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. 2022 Jul 29;3(4):272-289.
doi: 10.1109/TTS.2022.3195114. eCollection 2022 Dec.

Assessing Trustworthy AI in Times of COVID-19: Deep Learning for Predicting a Multiregional Score Conveying the Degree of Lung Compromise in COVID-19 Patients

Affiliations

Assessing Trustworthy AI in Times of COVID-19: Deep Learning for Predicting a Multiregional Score Conveying the Degree of Lung Compromise in COVID-19 Patients

Himanshi Allahabadi et al. IEEE Trans Technol Soc. .

Abstract

This article's main contributions are twofold: 1) to demonstrate how to apply the general European Union's High-Level Expert Group's (EU HLEG) guidelines for trustworthy AI in practice for the domain of healthcare and 2) to investigate the research question of what does "trustworthy AI" mean at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, we present the results of a post-hoc self-assessment to evaluate the trustworthiness of an AI system for predicting a multiregional score conveying the degree of lung compromise in COVID-19 patients, developed and verified by an interdisciplinary team with members from academia, public hospitals, and industry in time of pandemic. The AI system aims to help radiologists to estimate and communicate the severity of damage in a patient's lung from Chest X-rays. It has been experimentally deployed in the radiology department of the ASST Spedali Civili clinic in Brescia, Italy, since December 2020 during pandemic time. The methodology we have applied for our post-hoc assessment, called Z-Inspection®, uses sociotechnical scenarios to identify ethical, technical, and domain-specific issues in the use of the AI system in the context of the pandemic.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; COVID-19; Z-Inspection®; case study; ethical tradeoff; ethics; explainable AI; healthcare; pandemic; radiology; trust; trustworthy AI.

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Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Z-Inspection® process in a nutshell (adapted from [5]).
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Brixia score. (a) six zones definition and (b) and (c) examples of scores (either defined by the radiologist or estimated from the AI). In (b), confidence values generated by the AI prediction are shown (modified version of the figure in [1]).
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
COVID-19 reporting form.
Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.
Distribution of patients’ age (left) and sex (right) in the training dataset.

References

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