Health care is at a junction, a point where artificial intelligence tools are being introduced to all areas of the space. This introduction comes with great expectations: AI has the potential to greatly improve existing technologies, sharpen personalized medicines, and, with an influx of big data, benefit historically underserved populations.
But in order to do those things, the health care community must ensure that AI tools are trustworthy, and that they don’t end up perpetuating biases that exist in the current system. Researchers at the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic), an initiative to support AI research in health care, call for creating a robust infrastructure that can aid scientists and clinicians in pursuing this mission.
Fair and equitable AI for health care
The Jameel Clinic recently hosted the AI for Health Care Equity Conference to assess current state-of-the-art work in this space, including new machine learning techniques that support fairness, personalization, and inclusiveness; identify key areas of impact in health care delivery; and discuss regulatory and policy implications.
Nearly 1,400 people virtually attended the conference to hear from thought leaders in academia, industry, and government who are working to improve health care equity and further understand the technical challenges in this space and paths forward.
During the event, Regina Barzilay, the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of AI and Health and the AI faculty lead for Jameel Clinic, and Bilal Mateen, clinical technology lead at the Wellcome Trust, announced the Wellcome Fund grant conferred to Jameel Clinic to create a community platform supporting equitable AI tools in health care.
The project’s ultimate goal is not to solve an academic question or reach a specific research benchmark, but to actually improve the lives of patients worldwide. Researchers at Jameel Clinic insist that AI tools should not be designed with a single population in mind, but instead be crafted to be reiterative and
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