为医疗图像生成设定伦理准则,防止虚假信息和算法偏见。
Ethical Medical Image Synthesis
- 识别合成图像缺乏真实医学依据的固有缺陷
- 指出合成数据会引入分布偏差与歧视风险
- 提供可操作的伦理实践建议与监督机制
医疗图像合成(MISyn)的伦理任务旨在确保其研究与开发在整个生命周期中均符合伦理要求,以避免潜在负面影响。本文首先通过理论分析,揭示了伦理MISyn的关键属性及其内在局限:合成图像缺乏对真实医学现象的固有锚定,无法完全代表训练数据,且不可避免引入新的分布偏移和偏差。若忽视这些局限,可能引发严重伦理风险,极端表现为将合成图像冒充真实图像而不加说明,导致医疗影像数据环境信任崩塌,并造成算法歧视,损害利益相关者与公众权益。为此,本文基于理论分析提出实用支持措施,包括适应现有技术标准、问题定义、设计与评估流程的伦理实践建议,以及来自利益相关方和公众的监督建议。同时通过两个案例研究展示如何应用建议,并揭示当前实践与伦理标准之间的差距。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The task of ethical Medical Image Synthesis (MISyn) is to ensure that the MISyn techniques are researched and developed ethically throughout their entire lifecycle, which is essential to prevent the negative impacts of MISyn. To address the ever-increasing needs and requirements for ethical practice of MISyn research and development, we first conduct a theoretical analysis that identifies the key properties of ethical MISyn and intrinsic limits of MISyn. We identify that synthetic images lack inherent grounding in real medical phenomena, cannot fully represent the training medical images, and inevitably introduce new distribution shifts and biases. Ethical risks can arise from not acknowledging the intrinsic limits and weaknesses of synthetic images compared to medical images, with the extreme form manifested as misinformation of MISyn that substitutes synthetic images for medical images without acknowledgment. The resulting ethical harms include eroding trust in the medical imaging dataset environment and causing algorithmic discrimination towards stakeholders and the public. To facilitate collective efforts towards ethical MISyn within and outside the medical image analysis community, we then propose practical supports for ethical practice in MISyn based on the theoretical analysis, including ethical practice recommendations that adapt the existing technical standards, problem formulation, design, and evaluation practice of MISyn to the ethical challenges; and oversight recommendations to facilitate checks and balances from stakeholders and the public. We also present two case studies that demonstrate how to apply the ethical practice recommendations in practice, and identify gaps between existing practice and the ethical practice recommendations.
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