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Title: AI-generated Medical Data Can Sidestep Usual Ethics Review,
Universities Say

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/09/12/1531258/a...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Medical researchers at some institutions
in Canada, the United States and Italy are using data created by artificial
intelligence (AI) from real patient information in their experiments without
the need for permission from their institutional ethics boards, Nature has
learnt. To generate what is called 'synthetic data', researchers train
generative AI models using real human medical information, then ask the
models to create data sets with statistical properties that represent, but do
not include, human data. Typically, when research involves human data, an
ethics board must review how studies affect participants' rights, safety,
dignity and well-being. However, institutions including the IRCCS Humanitas
Research Hospital in Milan, Italy, the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario
(CHEO) in Ottawa and the Ottawa Hospital, both in Canada, and Washington
University School of Medicine (WashU Medicine) in St. Louis, Missouri, have
waived these requirements for research involving synthetic data. The reasons
the institutions use to justify this decision differ. However, the potential
benefits of using synthetic data include protecting patient privacy, being
more easily able to share data between sites and speeding up research, says
Khaled El Emam, a medical AI researcher at the CHEO Research Institute and
the University of Ottawa.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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