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
The paper examines how multi‑level fairness techniques—combining several bias‑mitigation steps—can reduce biases across patient demographics in health informatics. It reviews current literature, identifies gaps in implementation and reporting of health equity outcomes, and evaluates the role of reporting standards such as MINIMAR and TRIPOD in enhancing transparency. The authors conclude with recommendations to improve reporting transparency, broaden adoption of multi‑level fairness methods, and explicitly prioritize health equity in future research.
By Nick Souligne, Vignesh Subbian
Posted by Pooja Rao, Research Scientist, Google Research Health datasets play a crucial role in research and medical education, but it can be challenging to create a dataset that represents the real world. For example, dermatology conditions are diverse in their appearance and severity and manifest differently across skin tones.
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
arXiv:2608.30568v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Background: Population level assessments of predictive artificial intelligence (AI) can conceal performance disparities across subgroups. Fairness ev...
By Jo\~ao Matos, Ben Van Calster, Richard D. Riley, Paula Dhiman, Gary S. Collins
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