The “Racism” of X-Rays! Racial Identity in Medical Imagery! By Brian Simpson

There is a paper causing heart burn to the establishment: “Reading Race: AI Recognises Patient's Racial Identity In Medical Images,” Imon BanerjeeAnanth Reddy BhimireddyJohn L. BurnsLeo Anthony CeliLi-Ching ChenRamon CorreaNatalie DullerudMarzyeh GhassemiShih-Cheng HuangPo-Chih KuoMatthew P LungrenLyle PalmerBrandon J PriceSaptarshi PurkayasthaAyis PyrrosLuke Oakden-RaynerChima OkechukwuLaleh Seyyed-KalantariHari TrivediRyan WangZachary ZaimanHaoran ZhangJudy W Gichoya. It shows the extraordinary thing, that AI can detect race from medical imagery, even when humans can’t:

“Background: In medical imaging, prior studies have demonstrated disparate AI performance by race, yet there is no known correlation for race on medical imaging that would be obvious to the human expert interpreting the images.
Methods: Using private and public datasets we evaluate: A) performance quantification of deep learning models to detect race from medical images, including the ability of these models to generalize to external environments and across multiple imaging modalities, B) assessment of possible confounding anatomic and phenotype population features, such as disease distribution and body habitus as predictors of race, and C) investigation into the underlying mechanism by which AI models can recognize race.
Findings: Standard deep learning models can be trained to predict race from medical images with high performance across multiple imaging modalities. Our findings hold under external validation conditions, as well as when models are optimized to perform clinically motivated tasks. We demonstrate this detection is not due to trivial proxies or imaging-related surrogate covariates for race, such as underlying disease distribution. Finally, we show that performance persists over all anatomical regions and frequency spectrum of the images suggesting that mitigation efforts will be challenging and demand further study.
Interpretation: We emphasize that model ability to predict self-reported race is itself not the issue of importance. However, our findings that AI can trivially predict self-reported race -- even from corrupted, cropped, and noised medical images -- in a setting where clinical experts cannot, creates an enormous risk for all model deployments in medical imaging: if an AI model secretly used its knowledge of self-reported race to misclassify all Black patients, radiologists would not be able to tell using the same data the model has access to.”

https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10356

https://www.unz.com/isteve/ai-can-detect-race-from-x-rays-even-when-humans-cant/

 https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2021/08/09/biology-is-blasphemy-racist-reality-meets-anti-racist-inanity/

““Shocked, confused, and frankly horrified!” As Steve Sailer has reported, that’s how an anti-racist radiologist called Luke Oakden-Rayner sums up the reaction of himself and other medical researchers to a dark, dangerous, and deeply disturbing discovery in artificial intelligence (AI). What have they found? That AI has what Oakden-Rayner calls the “worst superpower.” It’s guilty of “medical racism,” because it can identify racial identity in X-rays and other medical images that, to human eyes, contain absolutely no clue as to race.

Emotion vs intellect

Is this a White lung or a Black lung or a Chinese lung? Humans can’t tell. But AI can. And ditto for the heart, the liver, the pancreas, the spleen, and, it appears, everything else in the human body. As that medical researcher despairingly concludes: “[T]here is no easy way to remove racial information from images. It is everywhere and it is in everything.”

Can I sympathize with his shock and horror? In fact, I can. As a kid, I once turned over a piece of old carpet in a shed and was startled and disgusted to see a host of plump and pale larvae chewing away at the underside. Ugh! But that was an instinctive reaction, not a scientific one. Today I hope I’d quickly overcome my disgust at a similar discovery with some amateur science: What species do the larvae belong to? How can they nourish themselves on carpet? How do they get water? And so on.

The blasphemous brain

Scientists quâ scientists shouldn’t be “shocked, confused and horrified” by an unexpected discovery. No, they should be pleased and interested. Unexpected discoveries, like the presence of microscopic life in tooth-scrapings or anomalies in the orbit of Mercury, are often gateways to greater things, to an expansion or overturning of previous scientific understanding. And the anti-racist radiologist Luke Oakden-Rayner and his colleagues were certainly not expecting what they have discovered:

Firstly, the performance of these [AI] models ranges from high to absurd. An AUC [Area Under the Curve, or correct identification] of 0.99 for recognising the self-reported race of a patient, which has no recognised medical imaging correlate? This is flat out nonsense.

Every radiologist I have told about these results is absolutely flabbergasted, because despite all of our expertise, none of us would have believed in a million years that x-rays and CT scans contain such strong information about racial identity. Honestly we are talking jaws dropped — we see these scans everyday and we have never noticed. (AI has the worst superpower… medical racism, Luke Oakden-Rayner, 2nd August 2021)

But in fact this discovery about racial information in “x-rays and CT scans” shouldn’t have been unexpected, let alone “shocking, confusing and frankly horrifying.” Anatomists have known for centuries that race can be identified from the skeleton — indeed, from the skull alone. If bones carry “racial information,” why not organs? And in fact, just as the skull commits blasphemy and betrays the reality of race, so does the brain inside the skull:

Modeling the 3D Geometry of the Cortical Surface with Genetic Ancestry

  • Geometry of the human cortical surface contains rich ancestral information
  • The most informative features are regional patterns of cortical folding and gyrification
  • This study provides insight on the influence of population structure on brain shape

… Here, we demonstrate that the three-dimensional geometry of cortical surface is highly predictive of individuals’ genetic ancestry in West Africa, Europe, East Asia, and America, even though their genetic background has been shaped by multiple waves of migratory and admixture events. The geometry of the cortical surface contains richer information about ancestry than the areal variability of the cortical surface, independent of total brain volumes. Besides explaining more ancestry variance than other brain imaging measurements, the 3D geometry of the cortical surface further characterizes distinct regional patterns in the folding and gyrification of the human brain associated with each ancestral lineage. (Modeling the 3D Geometry of the Cortical Surface with Genetic AncestryCurrent Biology, Volume 25, Issue 15, 3rd August 2015)

Leftist lies about the human brain: an anti-racist propaganda poster

That brain-study was published six years ago, which is a long time by the standards of rapidly advancing modern science. But at the same time as science is advancing, leftists are doing their best to obscure, distort, and deny any of its findings that contradict leftism. If the structure and size of the brain differ by race, an obvious conclusion follows: so do the functioning of the brain and the cognitive performance of different races. How could they not? The human intellect isn’t a ghost in the machine, but a product of the machine, that is, of the immensely complex electro-chemical mechanisms of the brain. Even if all humans were running the same neurological software, we wouldn’t be running it on the same systems. Some brains are faster and more efficient, some are slower and less efficient.

“Race is everywhere and in everything”

And those differences in the brain arise in decisive part from genetic differences, both within races and between them. The same applies to every other part of the human body. As the anti-racist doctor said: “[Race] is everywhere and it is in everything.” This isn’t surprising, because “everything” — every organ and aspect of physiology — is under different selective pressures in different physical and cultural environments. For example, lungs and red blood-cells that work well in low-lying Tahiti won’t work so well in elevated Tibet. As the racist Charles Darwin taught us, it’s a basic rule of biology that living organisms become adapted to their environments. Modern humans evolved in Africa, then migrated across the world, entering new environments and acquiring new adaptations, both directly, by natural selection, and indirectly, by inter-breeding with previous human migrants like Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other now-extinct members of the Homo genus.

Leftists like to pride themselves on their intellectual sophistication and their ability to cope with “complexity.” But when it comes to human biology and evolution, they become as hungry for simplicity and comforting falsehoods as any fundamentalist Christian. Rather than accept our rich and fascinating racial differences, leftists cling to the nonsensical slogan of “There’s only one race — the human race!” What could be simpler than that? And what could be falser? Reality says that racial differences are much more than skin-deep. They’re brain-deep, lung-deep, liver-deep, kidney-deep, and everything-else-deep. Luke Oakden-Rayner, the anti-racist doctor, claims that “There is no causal pathway linking racial identity and the appearance of, for example, pneumonia on a chest x-ray. By definition these features are spurious.”

The soothing simplicity of falsehood

In fact they’re “spurious” only “by definition” within the dogmas of leftism. But reality is racist and doesn’t care about leftist dogma. Disease affects different races in different ways. Leftists want to ignore this complexity and insist on the soothing simplicity of “No race but the human race!” They don’t recognize the crypto-religious nature of their own behaviour. For example, leftists jeer at and mock fundamentalist Christians for their rejection of Darwinism. The fundamentalists are disturbed by the idea of humans descending from ape-like ancestors and have sought refuge in the soothing simplicity of a God-created Adam and Eve from whom we all descend. But leftist denial of race serves the same psychological function. Indeed, its simplicity doesn’t just shield leftists from disturbing reality, but also allows them to indulge in an ancient religious custom: hunting for scapegoats.

If humans are all the same under the skin, then only one thing can explain why Blacks, for example, fail so badly and behave so badly. It can’t be anything innate or intrinsic to Blacks, so it must be an external force of evil: White racism! Whites are responsible for Black failure. Whites are oppressing and exploiting Blacks. What else could explain White success and Black failure? Well, it could be (and is) innate racial differences in cognition and psychology. That’s why the medical researchers described above are “shocked, confused, and frankly horrified” by what AI is telling them about biological reality. Their findings contradict their ideology and, like good leftists but unlike good scientists, they value ideology far above reality. In fact, they don’t seem to value reality at all, as you can see from one very telling reference in the anti-racist doctor’s blog-post. He lists examples of unacceptable racial discrimination, including the horrific fact that “Black newborns are substantially more likely to survive if they are treated by a Black doctor.”

Grinding non-Whites into the dirt

There you have it: White racism is killing Black babies! Or is it? In fact, no. Consider that patients with ingrowing toenails “are substantially more likely to survive” than patients with brain-cancer. Does this prove that chiropodists are better and more caring doctors than brain-surgeons and radiologists? Obviously not. As Greg Cochran pointed out at West Hunter, Black newborns with dangerous medical problems are more likely to be treated by White doctors than by Black doctors, who are “a much smaller percentage of specialists.” That explains the difference in survival rates. Meanwhile, Hispanic newborns in America have lower mortality and higher life-expectancy than White newborns. How can this be, when White racism and White supremacy are at work non-stop in America, remorselessly grinding Hispanics and other non-Whites into the dirt?

Well, leftists don’t ask how that can be, because they’re not interested in the truth. For leftists, ideology trumps reality, which is why they believe in censorship and suppression, not free speech and open debate. And what they can’t censor or suppress, they will distort and deny. At American Renaissance Gregory Hood has reported these highly revealing words by the leftist philosopher Daniel Dennett: “[I]f I encountered people conveying a message I thought was so dangerous that I could not risk giving it a fair hearing, I would be at least strongly tempted to misrepresent it, to caricature it for the public good. I’d want to make up some good epithets, such as genetic determinist or reductionist or Darwinian Fundamentalist, and then flail those straw men as hard as I could. As the saying goes, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.”

The innate evil of Whites

Countless other leftists think in the same way, because truth does not matter to them. The message of racial difference cannot be given a “fair hearing,” because it’s too “dangerous.” So instead of the truth about race, leftists insist on a lie about race: that it doesn’t exist and that all non-White failure is due to the greed, selfishness, and malevolence of Whites. This lie incites non-White violence against Whites and justifies systemic discrimination against Whites in education and employment. But underneath that leftist insistence on the non-existence of race is a contradictory belief in the innate evil of Whites and the immaculate conception of non-Whites, who are born without hereditary stain or spot. As Gregory Hood has said at AmRen: for Whites, anti-racism is a Church of the Damned, offering no hope of salvation or redemption. Whites are racist whatever they do, say or think. The only solution is dissolution. In the words of the late, great anti-racist Dr Noel Ignatiev (1940-2019), we have to “Abolish the white race.”

You’ve seen above how we can read race reliably from the human body. But I think we can also read race reliably in a more literal way: from the words people use and the ideas they promote.

Psychology is under decisive genetic influence, after all. I predict that artificial intelligence could also be trained to identify race from samples of written or spoken language. Language is another aspect of human biology and that anti-racist doctor captured a central truth of human biology when he said: “Race is everywhere and in everything.” To put it another way: Biology is blasphemy because reality is racist.”

 

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Monday, 25 November 2024

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