AI can guess a person's race with up to 99% accuracy just by looking at their X-rays

Artificial intelligence (AI) is used by medical facilities to help analyze x-rays and other medical scans, but a new study finds the technology can see more than just a patient's health – it can determine their race with startling accuracy. The study's 20 authors found deep learning models can identify race in chest and hand x-rays and mammograms among patients who identified as black, white and Asian. The algorithms correctly identify which images were from a black person more than 90 percent of the time, but also showed it was able to identity race with 99 percent accuracy at times. However, what is even more alarming is that the team was unable to explain how the AI systems were making accurate predictions, some of which were done with scans that were blurry or low-resolution. 'We emphasize that model ability to predict self-reported race is itself not the issue of importance,' Ritu Banerjee, associate professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine and lead author of the study, and collages wrote in the study published in arXiv.