New standards released to ensure medical AI is safe and effective for everyone

Healthcare professionals can harness artificial intelligence safely by following a new set of patient and industry-agreed standards.

An international initiative called STANDING Together has released new standards ensuring that medical artificial intelligence (AI) systems are developed with appropriate health datasets. These recommendations are the result of a two-year research study involving over 350 people from 58 countries, including patients, researchers, healthcare professionals, industry experts, and regulators.

The STANDING Together recommendations ensure that the full diversity of people, that AI systems will be used for, is represented in health datasets. This is imperative as AI systems are less likely to work well for people who aren’t properly represented in datasets – and may even be harmful. People who are in minority groups are particularly likely to be under-represented in datasets.

The recommendations provide guidance on collecting and reporting details such as age, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and other important characteristics. They also recommend that any limitations of the dataset should be transparently reported to ensure that developers creating AI systems can choose the best data for their purpose. Guidance is also given on how to identify those who may be harmed when medical AI systems are used, allowing this risk to be reduced.

STANDING Together is led by researchers at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, and the University of Birmingham. The research has been conducted with collaborators from over 30 institutions worldwide, including universities, the UK medicines regulator (the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, MHRA), patient groups and charities, and small and large health technology companies. The work has been funded by The Health Foundation and the NHS AI Lab and supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).