[HN Gopher] ML model can classify sex from retinal photograph, c...
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ML model can classify sex from retinal photograph, clinicians can't
 
Author : jeffbee
Score  : 113 points
Date   : 2021-05-15 13:59 UTC (9 hours ago)
 
web link (rdcu.be)
w3m dump (rdcu.be)
 
| p1esk wrote:
| How long did they train humans to perform this task?
 
  | dkarras wrote:
  | I don't think we even know what to look for yet.
  | 
  | >Clinicians are currently unaware of distinct retinal feature
  | variations between males and females, highlighting the
  | importance of model explainability for this task.
 
  | NoPie wrote:
  | Do we even need clinicians be able to distinguish male and
  | female retinas?
  | 
  | The task is meaningless. Yes, there might be some interesting
  | facts in discovery how male and female retinas are different.
  | It could even lead to differentiated treatments. But ML hasn't
  | provided any clues regarding this and therefore it is not that
  | deep.
 
| stewbrew wrote:
| "model was trained on 84,743 retinal fundus photos from the UK
| Biobank dataset. External validation was performed on 252 fundus
| photos"
| 
| Is it common practice in this field to test an overfitted model's
| performance with such a small data set so that the test could
| yield random results?
 
  | hervature wrote:
  | The probability of a 50% guess getting 75% accuracy (I believe
  | the paper is something like 77.2%) on 252 trials is 1 in 10^15.
 
  | drdeca wrote:
  | Are you asserting that it is overfit?
  | 
  | Also, before they tested on the other smaller dataset from a
  | different source, aiui, they also trained only on the earlier
  | subset of the first source, and used the later portion from the
  | first source (with no overlap in patients) for the testing.
  | 
  | (also, I'm not sure that 252 is really all that small?)
 
  | make3 wrote:
  | Why do you say that the model is overfitted? You have no way of
  | knowing that. Plus, 84 743 is a very reasonable size for a
  | vision dataset with a binary prediction
 
  | avalys wrote:
  | That was not the only validation set they used.
 
| kevingadd wrote:
| I would be curious whether this is actually classifying something
| that typically corresponds with sex, like hormone levels. In that
| case people with hormonal disorders would potentially be mis-
| classified, and someone photographed pre/during puberty might
| also be mis-classified. Since the paper mentions both neural and
| vascular tissue being represented in retinal photos, it seems
| like the levels of various hormones in the individual's blood
| could potentially also generate a mis-classification if they (for
| example) cause blood vessels in the eye to expand or contract.
| The mention that foveal pathology causes the model to mispredict
| suggests it would probably have issues in these cases too, I
| think.
| 
| I wonder what actual values they were trying to predict with this
| analysis? Based on the paper, I get the impression they were
| trying to do something more interesting and they got the best
| data for sex.
 
  | spuz wrote:
  | They were specifically trying to classify sex because it is
  | something that experts cannot already do:
  | 
  | > While our deep learning model was specifcally designed for
  | the task of sex prediction, we emphasize that this task has no
  | inherent clinical utility. Instead, we aimed to demonstrate
  | that AutoML could classify these images independent of salient
  | retinal features being known to domain experts, that is, retina
  | specialists cannot readily perform this task.
 
  | cassonmars wrote:
  | I wonder this too, and they could get a pretty solid answer if
  | they incorporated transgender folks' data into the set since
  | they're actively keeping their hormones in the desired ranges
  | of their gender identity.
 
    | esyir wrote:
    | Generally you'd start with the common, easier problem before
    | you delve into the abnormal cases. There are probably better
    | ways to do that, like looking at bloodwork.
 
      | lukeschlather wrote:
      | That's fine for training, but for testing the model delving
      | into abnormal cases seems required. If there's noticeable
      | difference on abnormal cases that gives a lot of insight
      | into what your model is actually testing.
 
        | cassonmars wrote:
        | All observations about the use of the term "abnormal"
        | aside, I agree the idea of specifically isolating the
        | hormone variable by using groups of people who naturally
        | fit that range and groups of people that use medication
        | to mirror that range would at least indicate whether this
        | classifier is picking up on sexual dimorphism or vascular
        | effects from hormonal differences (which also would
        | potentially impact not only transgender people, but
        | intersex people -- who make up around 3% of the
        | population)
 
| chx wrote:
| They claim they are able to detect _gender_ which according to
| the relevant Canadian government website https://cihr-
| irsc.gc.ca/e/48642.html
| 
| > Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours,
| expressions and identities of girls, women, boys, men, and gender
| diverse people
| 
| First it's not some hamfisted mixup of sex and gender:
| 
| > Terefore, this feld may contain a mixture of NHS recorded
| gender and self-reported gender. Genetic sex in the UK Biobank
| was determined
| 
| And yet:
| 
| > Predicting gender from fundus photos, previously inconceivable
| to those who spent their careers looking at retinas, also
| withstood external validation on an independent dataset of
| patients with different baseline demographics Although not likely
| to be clinically useful, this finding hints at the future
| potential of deep learning for the discovery of novel
| associations through unbiased modelling of high-dimensional data.
| 
| If we had a way to detect trans children, for sure that would be
| clinically useful!
| 
| Edit: as always, thanks for the downvotes, but please also
| educate me where I am wrong.
 
| phnofive wrote:
| The link points to some sort of viewer which lagged badly for me
| - here's the PDF:
| 
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-89743-x.pdf
 
| sxg wrote:
| (My mistake, missed their external validation)
 
  | Isinlor wrote:
  | They did external validation.
  | 
  | > External validation was performed on the Moorfields dataset.
  | This dataset differed from the UK Biobank development set with
  | respect to both fundus camera used, and in sourcing from a
  | pathology-rich population at a tertiary ophthalmic referral
  | center. The resulting sensitivity, specificity, PPV and ACC
  | were 83.9%, 72.2%, 78.2%, and 78.6% respectively
 
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Some women have 4 types of color rods, all men have only 3.
 
  | galangalalgol wrote:
  | Don't all women have 6 types but usually they all have very
  | similar or even identical frequency response? Only when they
  | have a colorblind gene are they noticeably different.
 
    | fxtentacle wrote:
    | I meant this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy
    | 
    | "Tetrachromacy is the condition of possessing four
    | independent channels for conveying color information, or
    | possessing four types of cone cell in the eye."
    | 
    | https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191517
    | 
    | "12% of women are carriers of [..] anomalous trichromacy."
 
      | galangalalgol wrote:
      | Yes, it says it is from carrying a colorblind gene, usually
      | red-green. But they have six copies of rhodopsin encoding
      | dna, usuall 3 of them are duplicates. In red green
      | colorblind only two are duplicates, but there are other
      | types of colorblind. Theoretically they could be
      | hexachromatic
 
      | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
      | From the wikipedia page linked in your comment:
      | 
      |  _One study suggested that 15% of the world 's women might
      | have the type of fourth cone whose sensitivity peak is
      | between the standard red and green cones, giving,
      | theoretically, a significant increase in color
      | differentiation.[23] Another study suggests that as many as
      | 50% of women and 8% of men may have four photopigments and
      | corresponding increased chromatic discrimination compared
      | to trichromats.[24]_
      | 
      | It's not just women.
 
        | wearywanderer wrote:
        | Nor is color blindness exclusively a male phenomena; in
        | Northern Europeans, 8% of males are colorblind while 0.5%
        | of females are.
        | 
        | Suppose a few more sexual dimorphic traits like this
        | exist in the eyes; perhaps differences that have no
        | practical effect on human vision and have consequently
        | gone unnoticed by clinicians. If the ML model is picking
        | up a few of these dimorphic traits, it could perhaps
        | classify sex with more accuracy than anybody looking at a
        | single trait could. This is pretty standard Bayesian
        | stuff; it's the way basic "Plan for Spam" style Bayesian
        | spam filters work.
 
| drcode wrote:
| Keep in mind ML models are really great at cheating to get
| answers: Maybe it's detecting that women have to tilt their head
| up more to reach the retinal photography machine, because they're
| shorter on average. Maybe, some of the images come from an
| optometrist that specializes in women's glass frames, and his
| retinal photography machine has a slightly dimmer bulb. Maybe,
| men are more likely to get a retinograph only when they have more
| severe disease already, so the retinas look different for that
| reason.
 
  | max_ wrote:
  | Thank you very much for this comment.
  | 
  | My problem with modern scientific publications is that they
  | focus more on the "discovery" instead of describing the logical
  | rigor as to why their "discovery" could be true or false.
 
  | ed25519FUUU wrote:
  | Reproducibility is one thing I like about AI research. If they
  | provide the model, I can take on my own computer and test it
  | against whatever I want and judge it.
  | 
  | Most things in science is almost impossible to reproduce
  | because of cost or specialized equipment.
 
  | Baeocystin wrote:
  | To wit- the apocryphal Tank story:
  | 
  | https://www.gwern.net/Tanks
 
    | B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
    | """
    | 
    | Once upon a time--I've seen this story in several versions
    | and several places, sometimes cited as fact, but I've never
    | tracked down an original source--once upon a time, I say, the
    | US Army wanted to use neural networks to automatically detect
    | camouflaged enemy tanks.
    | 
    | The researchers trained a neural net on 50 photos of
    | camouflaged tanks amid trees, and 50 photos of trees without
    | tanks. Using standard techniques for supervised learning, the
    | researchers trained the neural network to a weighting that
    | correctly loaded the training set--output "yes" for the 50
    | photos of camouflaged tanks, and output "no" for the 50
    | photos of forest.
    | 
    | Now this did not prove, or even imply, that new examples
    | would be classified correctly. The neural network might have
    | "learned" 100 special cases that wouldn't generalize to new
    | problems. Not, "camouflaged tanks versus forest", but just,
    | "photo-1 positive, photo-2 negative, photo-3 negative,
    | photo-4 positive..." But wisely, the researchers had
    | originally taken 200 photos, 100 photos of tanks and 100
    | photos of trees, and had used only half in the training set.
    | The researchers ran the neural network on the remaining 100
    | photos, and without further training the neural network
    | classified all remaining photos correctly. Success confirmed!
    | 
    | The researchers handed the finished work to the Pentagon,
    | which soon handed it back, complaining that in their own
    | tests the neural network did no better than chance at
    | discriminating photos. It turned out that in the researchers'
    | data set, photos of camouflaged tanks had been taken on
    | cloudy days, while photos of plain forest had been taken on
    | sunny days. The neural network had learned to distinguish
    | cloudy days from sunny days, instead of distinguishing
    | camouflaged tanks from empty forest.
    | 
    | """
 
    | sgt101 wrote:
    | apocryphal ehh?
 
  | X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
  | Yup. I learned this the hard way on the last model I trained at
  | scale. It was evaluating fit between two heterogeneous classes
  | I sampled training & test split off of a large time window and
  | got to work. It performed extremely well on test & training.
  | Too good.
  | 
  | I pulled a third sample from a completely different time window
  | and it performed terribly.
  | 
  | It turned out that both datasets were dominated by class A
  | being sorted into always selecting great fit or poor fit, so
  | the ML model learned to memorize the class A instances.
  | 
  | This problem when away when I subselected down to only
  | instances of class A that had examples of both good fit and
  | poor fit.
 
  | acituan wrote:
  | Their use of an external validation dataset eliminates many, if
  | not all, of those concerns.
  | 
  | Regarding external validation set:
  | 
  | > This dataset differed from the UK Biobank development set
  | with respect to both fundus camera used, and in sourcing from a
  | pathology-rich population at a tertiary ophthalmic referral
  | center.
  | 
  | Regarding UK Biobank set (training set)
  | 
  | > UK Biobank dataset, which is an observational study in the
  | United Kingdom that began in 2006 and has recruited over
  | 500,000 participants--85,262 of which received eye imaging38.
  | Eye imaging was obtained at 6 centers in the UK and comprises
  | over 10 terabytes of data39. Participants volunteered to
  | provide data including other medical imaging, laboratory
  | results, and detailed subjective questionnaires.
 
    | nerdponx wrote:
    | Still, until we have a better sense of what features the
    | model is extracting, it's a surprising result and ought to be
    | treated with caution.
 
  | robocat wrote:
  | Slight reflections of eyelashes? Especially if blurred?
 
| Kliment wrote:
| Here's a similar study from three years ago that tried to do the
| same with clinically relevant measures and got somewhat better
| results
| https://scihubtw.tw/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-0...
 
| fastaguy88 wrote:
| Sexy title, but it is unclear that clinicians can't classify sex
| from the retina, its just that they haven't bothered to. And the
| classification is not that great (<80% PPV on independent data).
| Clinicians will certainly get much higher sensitivity,
| specificity, and PPV just by looking at the subject ;)
 
| 988747 wrote:
| Clinicians don't care, so they never learn to distinguish. It's
| that simple.
 
| StreamBright wrote:
| ML model can't explain how it classifies retinal photographs,
| clinicians can.
 
| Causality1 wrote:
| Fascinating. I had no idea retinas were sexually dimorphic. I
| wonder if the difference serves a purpose or is just a
| consequence of some other adaptation.
 
  | esyir wrote:
  | There's also the risk of severe overfitting to some latent
  | variable. I haven't quite dug into the work itself yet, but it
  | does bring back memories of some case of perfect diagnosis due
  | to hospital documentation process though.
 
  | slibhb wrote:
  | Neither did doctors apparently. If everything is kosher,
  | they've proved some level of sexual dimorphism and now they can
  | investigate and perhaps find out what it is.
  | 
  | This is an interesting use of machine learning. We (or at least
  | I) normally think of these models as replacing or complementing
  | humans. But using them as a driver for research is cool.
 
| cerved wrote:
| This doesn't seem terribly well framed. Classifying the sex from
| a retinal photograph is useless. Obviously clinicians aren't
| going to be good at it. At which point I've lost interest
 
  | spuz wrote:
  | The paper is about 4 pages long - it takes about as long as it
  | to you to write that comment as it does to skim through and
  | learn that what you mentioned is exactly why they did the
  | study:
  | 
  | > While our deep learning model was specifcally designed for
  | the task of sex prediction, we emphasize that this task has no
  | inherent clinical utility. Instead, we aimed to demonstrate
  | that AutoML could classify these images independent of salient
  | retinal features being known to domain experts, that is, retina
  | specialists cannot readily perform this task.
  | 
  | It always amazes me how people spend 5 seconds reading a
  | headline but think they know more than someone who has spent
  | days and months on the same topic.
 
    | cerved wrote:
    | It's just an honest take. If I was more interested in the
    | subject maybe I would skim more but I'm not interested
    | enough.
    | 
    | Not trying to shit on anyone, it's just a brutally honest
    | opinion
 
      | spuz wrote:
      | Sorry I misinterpreted then. I thought you were dismissing
      | it out of negativity but actually it's worse - you actually
      | made a judgement that you knew more than the authors of the
      | study.
 
        | cerved wrote:
        | The only judgement I made was to not read the whole
        | paper. I read up until the paper stated that classifying
        | sex based on retinal pictures was unlikely to be
        | clinically useful. At which point I lost interest.
        | 
        | Why wasn't the ML model and clinician classifying
        | something that actually is clinically useful?
        | 
        | If it has no clinical significance, what's the relevance
        | of the classification of the clinicians?
        | 
        | How is it any more spectacular than beating a random
        | classifier?
        | 
        | Had these points been addressed at this point I might
        | have continued reading
 
      | scarnak wrote:
      | Why on earth are you even bothering to comment on the post
      | then? If you're not interested enough to even skim the
      | paper why do you think anyone would be interested to hear
      | what your opinion of it is? You're not "brutally honest",
      | you're just ignorant.
 
        | cerved wrote:
        | Because I had already spent time reading and maybe
        | someone could enlighten me as to why it in fact is
        | interesting. That and I was also hoping to get insulted
 
  | Klinky wrote:
  | I'd agree that if clinicians haven't been trained on this for
  | their line work, then the comparison is not fair, but I
  | wouldn't go so far as to say it's "useless".
 
    | cerved wrote:
    | They wrote in the paper it's useless
 
      | Klinky wrote:
      | Not having obvious clinical utility at the moment doesn't
      | mean it's outright useless.
 
        | cerved wrote:
        | No, you're right. But since there's a whole field on the
        | subject I figured they could have chosen something with
        | clinical utility and I don't really understand why they
        | didn't
 
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I remember a researcher doing some early research on compressing
| diagnostic imaging and was happy about all the hard disk space
| saved. They did some research to find out what level of
| compression they could go with that wouldn't result in different
| clinicians reaching different conclusions from the same images.
| 
| It really upset me. We probably threw away decades of training
| data that a computer could have used for early detection.
| 
| Fine for broken arms of whatever, but for cancer diagnostics,
| ugh. The computer might have been able to see the tumour before a
| clinician.
 
| [deleted]
 
| amelius wrote:
| What network topology did they use? I couldn't find it in the
| paper.
 
  | kevinventullo wrote:
  | In the section Model Training:
  | 
  | "Our deep learning model was trained using code-free deep
  | learning (CFDL) with the Google Cloud AutoML platform ... the
  | CFDL platform provides the option of image upload via shell-
  | scripting utilizing a .csv spreadsheet containing labels ...
  | Automated machine learning was then employed, which entails
  | neural architecture search and hyperparameter tuning."
  | 
  | Earlier, in the Limitations section:
  | 
  | "The design of the CFDL model was inherently opaque due to the
  | framework's automated nature with respect to model architecture
  | and hyperparameters. While this opacity is not unique to CFDL,
  | there is potential to further reduce ML explainability due to
  | lack of insight of model architectures and parameters
  | employed."
  | 
  | Maybe there's a whitepaper somewhere on how Google's AutoML
  | works?
 
| maCDzP wrote:
| I am going to drop a thought here to see what happens. If there
| is a difference between male/female retinas. Could this affect
| our perception of reality?
 
  | stirfish wrote:
  | If it were to affect our perception of reality, what
  | differences could we find?
  | 
  | I'm guessing that it would affect our perception of reality in
  | the same way eye color would.
 
  | LeoPanthera wrote:
  | Surely not any more than my terrible eyesight does. I don't
  | think my spectacles are altering my perception of reality.
 
    | Hoasi wrote:
    | Mine certainly do, because without them I would be blind.
 
  | [deleted]
 
  | wearywanderer wrote:
  | > _If there is a difference between male /female retinas_
  | 
  | Is this even an "if"? It's well established that men are more
  | likely to be colorblind, and it's likely many women are
  | tetrachromats (most people are mere trichromats). The genes for
  | the extra cone pigments are in the X chromosome, and are
  | seemingly expressed more often when somebody has two X
  | chromosomes. Similarly, people with two X chromosomes are less
  | likely to be colorblind because most forms of colorblindness
  | are caused by defects in genes in X chromosomes.
  | 
  | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans
  | 
  | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Genetics
  | 
  | Perhaps most men and women, men and women with normal
  | trichromatic vision, have identical retinas. But with genes so
  | important to eyeballs residing in the X chromosome, who knows.
  | But I'm left wondering why experts are particularly surprised
  | by this result.
 
  | BurningFrog wrote:
  | My guess: Only in trivial ways.
  | 
  | The fact that women see the world from a ~20cm lower point
  | probably has real impact.
  | 
  | For one thing, guys, your nose hair is very visible from that
  | height.
 
    | NaturalPhallacy wrote:
    | A few funny anecdotes in that vein.
    | 
    | A woman complained that her very tall boyfriend had hung a
    | mirror in the bathroom. She took a picture of it. It was her
    | reflection holding the camera level with the top of her head,
    | and little else.
    | 
    | One that happened to me personally. I asked my then gf (5'1")
    | what it was like being a small person, do you feel like a
    | normal sized person in a land of giants? "Yes" was the
    | instant response.
    | 
    | One very tall guy once remarked: "The tops of your fridges
    | are fucking disgusting."
 
      | xorfish wrote:
      | > A woman complained that her very tall boyfriend had hung
      | a mirror in the bathroom. She took a picture of it. It was
      | her reflection holding the camera level with the top of her
      | head, and little else.
      | 
      | As a tall guy, there is a surprising number of bathroom
      | mirrors where my reflection doesn't include my head.
 
  | hervature wrote:
  | I don't like philosophical questions like this. Let's say male
  | blue is female red and vice versa. Our perception of the world
  | is different yet it doesn't change anything as to how we
  | understand and interact with "reality".
 
    | vmception wrote:
    | I would argue that it does and that we conform behaviors to a
    | standard, but there are alot of assumptions we make that lead
    | us to not understand each other at all
    | 
    | There is a shared experience isolated to one sex that the
    | other cannot perceive
 
    | CyanBird wrote:
    | It is well backed up by science that women can see or at
    | least perceive/brainlog a stronger variety of colors than
    | men, and then this is expressed on women having a stronger
    | beefier vocabulary when it comes to naming and identifying
    | colors
    | 
    | So yeah, that's a thing
    | 
    | Also, what you are describing is called Qualia, and that is
    | intangible qualities of how the brain processes data, such as
    | the "yellowness of a lemon", or the "foot pain of stepping on
    | unexpected rock shoeless"
    | 
    | Qualia can't be verbalized or compared between people because
    | it is an inherent "brainfeel", you just need to expect others
    | to have "at least similar-ish" qualias
 
      | hervature wrote:
      | Right, and children hear much higher frequencies than the
      | rest of us. Just because you see more doesn't fundamentally
      | change how we perceive reality. Like if someone says there
      | is a color between eggshell white and snow white, I believe
      | them because there is obviously a gradient there. I don't
      | need to see their reality to agree on the state of it.
 
        | bobthechef wrote:
        | What's "fundamental" in this respect?
        | 
        | If someone is colorblind, and another isn't, does that
        | entail a change in perception? Sure. It means the
        | colorblind guy can't discern things that people with
        | normal vision can.
        | 
        | A person born blind can't see anything and never has.
        | They don't even imagine visual images (only images
        | informed by the remaining senses). Their perception is
        | unimaginable to me and mine to them.
        | 
        | So if women can discern more colors than men, it follows
        | that they experience more colors which seems like a
        | matter of perception. Have you never argued with a woman
        | about the color of a sweater?
 
    | maCDzP wrote:
    | Yeah - you are right. I thought about it and I guess since we
    | can interact our perception can't be to far off - otherwise
    | we wouldn't be able to procreate. It would be something out
    | of the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. A specie that because
    | of a retinal differences between sexes is unable to mate.
 
  | slver wrote:
  | No
 
  | matheuss-leonel wrote:
  | Holy shit
 
| almog wrote:
| Just throwing a guess here about one factor that partitions
| photos based on sex might: height (I'm assuming males are
| generally taller).
| 
| Looking at how a retinal photography machine looks like, I'd
| guess the height at which the photo is taken might slightly
| affect the POV angle, which in turn might be just enough to get
| caught by the ML model.
 
  | hellbannedguy wrote:
  | I had a Ph.D instructor in psychology.
  | 
  | She said, women are actually taller than men when all cultures
  | are studied.
  | 
  | I don't care enough to dig deeper, but always stuck with me.
 
    | jan_Inkepa wrote:
    | That's an unexpected (to me at least) claim to make - https:/
    | /onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.1330530... - I
    | always thought of sexual dimoprhism (men taller than women on
    | average) as a given and this paper backs up my claim
    | specifically in the context of human societies (where it
    | gives a 10cm height advantage in average in men over women,
    | comparing 216 different societies ). There might be some way
    | of counting in which the converse is true, but not in any way
    | I know. I understand you don't want to dig deeper, but
    | thought I'd flag it in case anyone else unwittingly digests
    | this (possibly wrong) knowldge.
    | 
    | https://www.quantamagazine.org/males-are-the-taller-sex-
    | estr... is an example of a pop-sci article assuming the same
    | basis (written by a biology phd).
 
    | username90 wrote:
    | People with Ph.D's often makes up facts and believes in
    | nonsense just like everybody else.
    | 
    | Edit: This includes those with STEM degrees as well. You
    | really shouldn't trust someone more just because they have a
    | research degree. I knew a professor who claimed to have
    | solved some famous problems but that the peer reviewers just
    | didn't want to accept that he solved it and therefore
    | rejected his papers.
 
      | make3 wrote:
      | like you did just now. That person made something up. Let's
      | not put all Ph.Ds in a bag just for that.
 
    | Erik816 wrote:
    | She appears to have made that up:
    | https://www.worlddata.info/average-bodyheight.php
 
| sojournerc wrote:
| I'm curious if the a difference in cone density or distribution
| could be the differentiator.
| 
| https://theneurosphere.com/2015/12/17/the-mystery-of-tetrach...
 
| DoubleDerper wrote:
| "EK is a consultant for Google Health. PAK has received speaker
| fees from Heidelberg Engineering, Topcon, Haag-Streit, Allergan,
| Novartis and Bayer. PAK has served on advisory boards for
| Novartis and Bayer, and is a consultant for DeepMind, Roche,
| Novartis and Apellis. KB has received research grants from
| Novartis, Bayer. Heidelberg and Roche. KB has received speaker
| fees from Novartis, Bayer, TopCon, Heidelberg, Allergan, Alimera.
| KB is a consultant for Novartis, Bayer and Roche. AK is a
| consultant to Aerie, Allergan, Novartis, Google Health, Reichert
| and Santen. All other co-authors have no competing interests to
| declare."
| 
| Worth noting.
 
| mahathu wrote:
| This is a really impressive result and an interesting result to
| apply ML to. Thank you for sharing, OP. I'm just wondering if
| there are any real world applications of why you'd want to tell
| the sex of a person by a retinal photograph? It seems like a bit
| of a useless skill to have?
 
  | qayxc wrote:
  | I think this more an example how black-box models are basically
  | useless for clinical research.
  | 
  | The authors aren't aware of any distinguishing retinal features
  | between male and female eyes and the model itself has no
  | explanatory power.
  | 
  | Could be a Clever Hans situation where the model exploits meta
  | information of some kind in the absence of actual features. It
  | could just as well mean that there are indeed distinguishing
  | features that are compromised in the presence of foveal
  | pathology.
  | 
  | The authors note that another study using manually selected
  | features identified three features that are indicative of
  | genetical sex. These features yielded about 0.78 AUROC accuracy
  | measure. Compared to the presented model's AUROC accuracy of
  | 0.93 that's only 19% worse and these 19% additional accuracy
  | may point to a combination of the already identified features
  | or one or more additional features.
  | 
  | I personally find this paper rather pointless. It stops at the
  | point where actual progress could be made and things would get
  | interesting - why didn't the authors evaluate the previously
  | known features on the model's matches to measure their
  | significance?
  | 
  | This could have told them whether their black-box was relying
  | on the same set of features as the ones identified by previous
  | work, for example.
 
| zephyr____ wrote:
| This is a step backwards for LGBTQI rights.
| 
| It is scientifically proven that there are no differences between
| men and women.
| 
| I hope the inevitable retraction gets as much attention on HN.
 
  | stirfish wrote:
  | >It is scientifically proven that there are no differences
  | between men and women.
  | 
  | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism
 
  | rs999gti wrote:
  | > It is scientifically proven that there are no differences
  | between men and women.
  | 
  | XY and XX chromosomes don't matter? Then what are all those
  | fertility doctors doing?
 
  | claudiawerner wrote:
  | Don't feed the troll.
 
| Traster wrote:
| >Clinicians are currently unaware of distinct retinal feature
| variations between males and females, highlighting the importance
| of model explainability for this task.
| 
| If I'm reading this correctly what they're saying is that since
| we don't currently know the difference between male and female
| retinas, being able to explain what the ML black box is doing is
| important. But from what I can see in the paper they basically
| don't know what the black box is doing, they really don't
| understand what features their tool has isolated. I might be
| misunderstanding though?
 
  | NieDzejkob wrote:
  | Yes, they are highlighting the importance of research towards
  | model explainability.
 
    | slver wrote:
    | I believe that's impossible.
 
      | TaylorAlexander wrote:
      | ML explainability is a wide field with a lot of success.
      | For example you can discover what features are activating
      | which detections. You comment, taken literally, suggests
      | that research in this field is impossible. That is not the
      | case.
 
        | sigstoat wrote:
        | when the activated feature in an image recognition net
        | looks like a lovecraftian horror, that doesn't explain
        | how the net came up with "turtle".
        | 
        | explainability is going to have a rough time for the same
        | reason ai alignment is going to have a rough time. people
        | think they can explain decisions (technical and moral)
        | far more effectively than they actually can.
 
  | oogabooga123 wrote:
  | Your question is confusing, it might be that you are using
  | "feature" in an ML sense and the quote refers to human
  | describable distinctions we know about? But I still don't know
  | how to parse your question.
  | 
  | The model can predict male vs female retinas but they don't
  | understand why. What exactly are you asking?
 
    | TaylorAlexander wrote:
    | ML models have layers, and neurons in a given layer detect
    | "features" in the image or in the previous layer. So yes I
    | believe the person meant which structures in the image are
    | activating the network. Which is a well studied area so it is
    | surprising the authors didn't explore that.
 
  | thaumasiotes wrote:
  | I don't really understand your confusion?
  | 
  | They say the following:
  | 
  | - This model can distinguish photographs of a male retina from
  | photographs of a female retina.
  | 
  | - We don't know, ourselves, how to do that.
  | 
  | - We would like to be able to determine, from looking at the
  | model, what features it's using to draw the distinction.
  | 
  | What's weird?
 
    | mattkrause wrote:
    | > We don't know, ourselves, how to do that.
    | 
    | Have we actually tried?
    | 
    | There is a cursory discussion about how this is
    | "inconceivable to those who spent their careers looking at
    | retinas". However, if it's not clinically useful (as the next
    | sentence says), those experts probably haven't spent much--if
    | any--training themselves to try.
    | 
    | Humans can learn to detect surprisingly subtle features. For
    | example, the right training regime can make you _much_ better
    | are reporting a tile of a line, but it requires practice and
    | feedback, just like the network got.
 
    | Traster wrote:
    | What I'm confused by is that they say this is important to
    | do, but then don't actually seem to do it?
 
      | JabavuAdams wrote:
      | Important to do next.
 
      | make3 wrote:
      | future work is almost always discussed in publications
 
      | joe_the_user wrote:
      | They don't give an explanation because they don't know how
      | to give an explanation - many if not most ML model lack an
      | easy explanation presently, they just spit out answers.
      | 
      | They are saying "someone should do this because it's
      | important even though we don't (presently) know how to do
      | this".
 
        | aaron-santos wrote:
        | I'm open to learning why class activation maps (CAM)
        | would or wouldn't be a good place to start.
 
  | hervature wrote:
  | We're not at the point of explaining complicated models with a
  | straight face. Based on the saliency maps, it looks like the
  | model has learned something around the bright circles (or is it
  | the blind spot? Not an ophthalmologist). Makes me think the
  | network can reverse engineer distortions in the light to get
  | curvature of the lens which might be indicative of gender
  | differences.
 
| contrarian_5 wrote:
| thats going to be one of the biggest shocks to society going
| forward when it comes to the changes that AI bring. there are
| mountains of data everywhere that is completely overlooked simply
| because the cost of processing the data is too high. too high to
| discover patterns/correlation and too high to process in any
| case.
| 
| human beings filter out most of what goes on around them. they
| dont see the world as it is and their minds dont keep track of
| physical primitives. their minds abstract the world into larger
| conceptual parts and track those parts. its not just a question
| of processing power, its a question of intuitive access. and
| nobody realizes this yet because the only sentient beings who are
| around to demonstrate any of this have those filters in place.
| when the AI comes with all that horse power and with no filters,
| it will see things all around that we are blind to. it will seem
| as though it can make impossible predictions. it will seem god-
| like, even before it graduates to doing something other than
| simply observing the world.
 
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Odds on it detecting mascara or eyelashes or some other makeup?
| Retinal photos have to go through the front of the eye, after
| all.
 
  | terramex wrote:
  | If there ever was mascara on your retina you better be going to
  | the hospital quickly.
 
    | [deleted]
 
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