Detecting Spurious Correlations with Sanity Tests for Artificial Intelligence Guided Radiology Systems
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Abstract (arXiv)
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been successful at solving numerous problems in machine perception. In radiology, AI systems are rapidly evolving and show progress in guiding treatment decisions, diagnosing, localizing disease on medical images, and improving radiologists' efficiency. A critical component to deploying AI in radiology is to gain confidence in a developed system's efficacy and safety. The current gold standard approach is to conduct an analytical validation of performance on a generalization dataset from one or more institutions, followed by a clinical validation study of the system's efficacy during deployment. Clinical validation studies are time-consuming, and best practices dictate limited re-use of analytical validation data, so it is ideal to know ahead of time if a system is likely to fail analytical or clinical validation. In this paper, we describe a series of sanity tests to identify when a system performs well on development data for the wrong reasons. We illustrate the sanity tests' value by designing a deep learning system to classify pancreatic cancer seen in computed tomography scans.
Key facts. Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 29 of its 89 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2021.
Builds on
29 of 89 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 4; 2023: 2; 2024: 1; 2025: 2; 2026: 1.
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