Posted by Dave Steiner, Clinical Research Scientist, Google Health, and Rory Pilgrim, Product Manager, Google Research There’s a worldwide shortage of access to medical imaging expert interpretation across specialties including radiology , dermatology and pathology . Machine learning (ML) technology can help ease this burden by powering tools that enable doctors to interpret these images more accurately and efficiently.
By Google AI
Posted by Rishabh Tiwari, Pre-doctoral Researcher, and Pradeep Shenoy, Research Scientist, Google Research Machine learning models in the real world are often trained on limited data that may contain unintended statistical biases . For example, in the CELEBA celebrity image dataset, a disproportionate number of female celebrities have blond hair, leading to classifiers incorrectly predicting “blond” as the hair color for most female faces — here, gender is a spurious feature for predicting hair color.
By Google AI
The study examines why dermatology AI models, largely trained on light‑skinned, cancer‑focused images, perform poorly when applied to diverse patient populations. By comparing a cancer‑trained baseline, two dermatology foundation models, and a general‑purpose vision model on tone‑stratified and disease‑shifted datasets, the authors find that disease‑distribution shift, rather than skin‑tone underrepresentation, is the primary cause of generalization failure. Representation analysis shows that cancer‑specialized features lack transferable structure, while dermatology‑pretrained features maintain stronger clustering, and lightweight adaptation with about ten labeled examples per category can recover most performance.
By Nirajan Kunwor, Sanjaya Poudel, Quoc-Huy Trinh, Jahidul Arafat, Sunil Kumar Gaire
Posted by Mike Schaekermann, Research Scientist, Google Research, and Ivor Horn, Chief Health Equity Officer & Director, Google Core Health equity is a major societal concern worldwide with disparities having many causes. These sources include limitations in access to healthcare, differences in clinical treatment, and even fundamental differences in the diagnostic technology.
By Google AI
Posted by Omar Benjelloun, Software Engineer, Google Research, and Peter Mattson, Software Engineer, Google Core ML and President, MLCommons Association Machine learning (ML) practitioners looking to reuse existing datasets to train an ML model often spend a lot of time understanding the data, making sense of its organization, or figuring out what subset to use as features. So much time, in fact, that progress in the field of ML is hampered by a fundamental obstacle: the wide variety of data representations.
By Google AI
OptimusKG is a multimodal biomedical labeled property graph that integrates structured and semi‑structured resources to preserve detailed, type‑specific metadata across molecular, anatomical, clinical, and environmental domains. The graph contains nearly 191,000 nodes, over 21.8 million edges, and more than 67 million property instances derived from 18 ontologies, with a top‑level schema that enforces node and edge constraints while retaining granular provenance. Validation using the PaperQA3 agent found that 70.0% of sampled edges are supported by literature evidence, and the graph offers a standardized resource for machine learning, knowledge‑grounded retrieval, and hypothesis generation in biomedical research.
By Lucas Vittor, Ayush Noori, I\~naki Arango, Joaqu\'in Polonuer, Sam Rodriques, Andrew White, David A. Clifton, Marinka Zitnik
Posted by Nishant Jain, Pre-doctoral Researcher, and Pradeep Shenoy, Research Scientist, Google Research The constantly changing nature of the world around us poses a significant challenge for the development of AI models. Often, models are trained on longitudinal data with the hope that the training data used will accurately represent inputs the model may receive in the future.
By Google AI
arXiv:2608. 16198v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dermatology models face distribution shifts in teledermatology settings, where submitted images differ from the training data in lighting, angle, distance, focus, and framing.
By Fabian Gr\"oger, Marco Weishaupt, Philippe Gottfrois, Simone Lionetti, Linda Wermelinger, Nipun Ranasekara, Ludovic Amruthalingam, Alexander A. Navarini, Marc Pouly
arXiv:2605. 07022v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Manually curated biomedical repositories -- spanning bioactivity, genomics, and chemistry -- are expensive to maintain, lag behind primary literature, and discard experimental context, obscuring nuances needed to assess data correctness and coverage.
By Haydn Jones, Yimeng Zeng, Alden Rose, Li S. Yifei, Yining Huang, Kaiwen Wu, Jiaming Liang, Maggie Ziyu Huan, Yoseph Barash, Cesar de la Fuente-Nunez, Osbert Bastani, Zachary Ives, Mark Yatskar, Jacob R. Gardner
The paper introduces the Semantic Tri-view Pipeline, an interpretable system that automatically screens teledermatology photographs for gradability by analyzing epidermal micro-relief across up to three smartphone views. It uses a lightweight DeepLabV3+ model to segment micro-relief fidelity and aggregates the resulting spatial masks with logistic regression, leveraging viewpoint redundancy to improve robustness. Evaluated on the SCIN dataset, the approach raises the AUC from 0.81 to 0.96 on optically clear cases, offering real‑time, privacy‑by‑design feedback to filter ungradable photo sets before clinician review.
By Robert Engel
Accurate dermatological diagnosis naturally necessitates equitable performance across diverse populations, yet a systematic lack of expertly annotated images, especially for underrepresented skin tones and rare diseases, impedes progress toward measurably fair methods. We introduce cgDDI (Controllable Generation of Diverse Dermatological Imagery), a hybrid framework that (1) synthesizes realistic healthy skin samples without disturbing other input properties, (2) maps single-sample rare lesions onto novel skin-tones and locations non-parametrically, and (3) allows for efficient parametric generation with as few as 10 training samples.
Acne vulgaris affects most adolescents and many adults. Accurate severity grading guides treatment, monitoring, and clinical trial endpoints, but manual assessment using the Investigator's Global Assessment or Hayashi criteria is limited by inter-rater variability and inconsistent imaging conditions.