A Critique On The Public Discussion On Skewness And Bias In Health Care AI

On July 31, 2019, DeepMind published a research letter in Nature (via AI in Healthcare) about a clinically applicable approach to the continuous prediction of acute kidney injury (AKI). The predictive model was developed on a longitudinal dataset comprised of 703,782 adult patients across 172 inpatient and 1,062 outpatient sites. It "predicted more than half (55.8%) of all inpatient episodes of acute kidney injury and 90.2% of all acute kidney injuries that required dialysis. The lead-up time was 48 hours, and the model had a ratio of two false alerts for every true alert." TechCrunch reported on the study in an article titled "DeepMind touts predictive health care AI'breakthrough' trained on heavily skewed data."