首次量化病理大模型的隐私泄露、公平性与可靠性风险,推动临床落地。
Beyond Diagnostic Performance: Revealing and Quantifying Ethical Risks in Pathology Foundation Models
- 构建评估框架,量化模型对患者敏感信息的泄露程度。
- 发现模型在不同人群和机构间存在显著性能差异。
- 适合关注AI医疗伦理与可信赖部署的研究者与医生。
病理基础模型(PFMs)作为面向计算病理学的大规模预训练模型,已显著推进多种应用。然而,我们识别出若干关键且相互关联的伦理风险,包括患者敏感属性泄露、跨人口与机构群体的性能差异,以及依赖诊断无关特征影响临床可靠性。本文首次系统量化了这些伦理风险,提出评估框架,涵盖模型表示中患者敏感属性的可推断性、不同群体间的性能差异、以及诊断无关特征的影响程度。通过实证分析揭示风险成因,并提出缓解方向。研究强调亟需为PFMs建立伦理保障机制,推动更可信、可靠的临床应用。相关评估工具将开源,支持未来模型开发与审计。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Pathology foundation models (PFMs), as large-scale pre-trained models tailored for computational pathology, have significantly advanced a wide range of applications. Their ability to leverage prior knowledge from massive datasets has streamlined the development of intelligent pathology models. However, we identify several critical and interrelated ethical risks that remain underexplored, yet must be addressed to enable the safe translation of PFMs from lab to clinic. These include the potential leakage of patient-sensitive attributes, disparities in model performance across demographic and institutional subgroups, and the reliance on diagnosis-irrelevant features that undermine clinical reliability. In this study, we pioneer the quantitative analysis for ethical risks in PFMs, including privacy leakage, clinical reliability, and group fairness. Specifically, we propose an evaluation framework that systematically measures key dimensions of ethical concern: the degree to which patient-sensitive attributes can be inferred from model representations, the extent of performance disparities across demographic and institutional subgroups, and the influence of diagnostically irrelevant features on model decisions. We further investigate the underlying causes of these ethical risks in PFMs and empirically validate our findings. Then we offer insights into potential directions for mitigating such risks, aiming to inform the development of more ethically robust PFMs. This work provides the first quantitative and systematic evaluation of ethical risks in PFMs. Our findings highlight the urgent need for ethical safeguards in PFMs and offer actionable insights for building more trustworthy and clinically robust PFMs. To facilitate future research and deployment, we will release the assessment framework as an online toolkit to support the development, auditing, and deployment of ethically robust PFMs.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。