Clinical Data Sharing for AI: Proposed Framework Could Rouse Debate - AI Trends

A group of doctors from Stanford University has proposed a framework for sharing clinical data for artificial intelligence (AI) that could set off a firestorm of debate about who truly owns medical data, ethical obligations to share it, and how to properly police researchers who use it. On the other hand, the envisioned approach has parallels to the open science tactics currently being uniformly deployed to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. The framework's central premise is that clinical data should be treated as a public good when it is used for secondary purposes such as research or the development of AI algorithms, as detailed in a special report (doi: 10.1148/radiol.2020192536) That means broadening access to aggregated, de-identified clinical data, forbidding its sale and holding everyone who interacts with it accountable for protecting patient privacy, explains study lead author David B. Larson, M.D., M.B.A., vice chair of clinical operations for the radiology department at Stanford University School of Medicine. Although the framework published in a journal specific to radiology, and three of its authors are radiologists, the structure is "universally applicable to other types of medical data as well," says Larson.