AI for radiographic COVID-19 detection selects shortcuts over signal.

ABSTRACT: Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers and radiologists have recently reported AI systems that accurately detect COVID-19 in chest radiographs. However, the robustness of these systems remains unclear. Using state-of-the-art techniques in explainable AI, we demonstrate that recent deep learning systems to detect COVID-19 from chest radiographs rely on confounding factors rather than medical pathology, creating an alarming situation in which the systems appear accurate, but fail when tested in new hospitals. We observe that the approach to obtain training data for these AI systems introduces a nearly ideal scenario for AI to learn these spurious "shortcuts." Because this approach to data collection has also been used to obtain training data for detection of COVID-19 in computed tomography

SUBMITTER: DeGrave AJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7523163 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature