The Ministry of Health and Welfare yesterday launched a clinical data verification and certification system in a boost to medical artificial intelligence (AI) research in Taiwan.
The nation needs to train medical algorithms on indigenous data that reflect conditions in Taiwan to avoid AI bias in “smart” medicine, Department of Information Management Director Lee Chien-chang (李建璋) said at the system’s launch event in Taipei.
Medical AI trained on data derived from one nation or region could be ineffective in another, because of demographic differences, he said.
Photo: Lin Hui-chin, Taipei Times
For example, a model for diagnosing diabetes-related retinal diseases recently adapted in Thailand was found to be nearly useless in practice, despite its high accuracy in laboratory conditions, he said.
The flaw of the system was in its dataset, which included only people with or without diabetes-related retinal disorders, Lee said.
Overrepresentation of privileged or well-researched demographic groups due to gaps in wealth or the urban-country divide could also compromise a model’s effectiveness, Lee said.
The department and the Food and Drug Administration jointly subsidized clinical data centers at Taichung Veterans’ General Hospital, Kaohsiung Chang Kung Memorial Hospital, Tri-Service General Hospital and Far Eastern Memorial Hospital, he said.
The centers feature an inter-hospital data comparison function and a federated learning model to meet Health Level Seven Inc’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard, he said.
Using a federated learning model and a centralized verification and certification process allow developers to work without accessing physical documents, test a model’s effectiveness on data derived from multiple hospitals and ensure digital privacy, he said.
The system can depersonalize data and AI training suggestions to hasten the certification of models, Lee said.
Each branch of the AI datacenter has a specific mission, such as data security and privacy protection, certifying AI safety and fairness, and making recommendations for a model’s inclusion in the National Health Insurance system, he said.
Rigorous and standardized verification of clinical data integrity is crucial to the nation’s medical AI development, ministry Secretary-General Liu Yu-chuan (劉玉娟) said.
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