Judy Gichoya: Operationalising Fairness in Medical Algorithms: A grand challenge

The year 2020 has brought into focus a second pandemic of social injustice and systemic bias with the disproportionate deaths observed for minority patients infected with COVID. As we observe an increase in development and adoption of AI for medical care, we note variable performance of the models when tested on previously unseen datasets, and also bias when the outcome proxies such as healthcare costs are utilized. Despite progressive maturity in AI development with increased availability of large open source datasets and regulatory guidelines, operationalizing fairness is difficult and remains largely unexplored. In this talk, we review the background/context for FAIR and UNFAIR sequelae of AI algorithms in healthcare, describe practical approaches to FAIR Medical AI, and issue a grand challenge with open/unanswered questions.