Lack of children in public medical imaging data points to growing age bias in biomedical AI
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming healthcare, but its benefits are not reaching all patients equally. Children remain overlooked with only 17% of FDA-approved medical AI devices labeled for pediatric use. In this work, we demonstrate that this exclusion may stem from a fundamental data gap. Our systematic review of 181 public medical imaging datasets reveals that children represent just under 1% of available data, while the majority of machine learning imaging conference papers we surveyed utilized publicly available data for methods development. Much like systematic biases of other kinds in model development, past studies have demonstrated the manner in which pediatric representation in data used for models intended for the pediatric population is essential for model performance in that population. We add to these findings, showing that adult-trained chest radiograph models exhibit significant age bias when applied to pediatric populations, with higher false positive rates in younger children. This work underscores the urgent need for increased pediatric representation in publicly accessible medical datasets. We provide actionable recommendations for researchers, policymakers, and data curators to address this age equity gap and ensure AI benefits patients of all ages. 1-2 sentence summary Our analysis reveals a critical healthcare age disparity: children represent less than 1% of public medical imaging datasets. This gap in representation leads to biased predictions across medical image foundation models, with the youngest patients facing the highest risk of misdiagnosis.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.059 | 0.320 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".