Google canceled the online publication of more than 100,000 X-rays after privacy concerns

In 2017, Google was two days away from posting 112,000 chest X-rays taken of more than 30,000 patients on public servers before last-minute privacy concerns put a stop to the project. The X-rays were part of a program conducted with the National Institutes of Health to see if Google's machine learning tools could be used to better identify disease markers using visual information. The X-rays were collected at a government research hospital in Bethesda, Maryland where a large number of clinical research studies were being conducted. According to a new report in The Washington Post, based on emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Google and NIH began collaborating on the project in the summer of 2017 and were hoping to reveal findings from the project at an artificial intelligence conference in Hawaii on July 21. The X-rays were analyzed by Google's TensorFlow, an open source machine learning software that was developed by the Google Brain Team in 2015.