AI Fairness Initiative

Clinical trial populations have historically failed to represent certain demographics, in particular minority ethnicities, who are disproportionately impacted by a particular medical condition under research. In the USA, only 2% of clinical trial populations are black, despite Multiple Sclerosis having a 47% higher risk for this demographic than for white patients.

As data scientists at Roche, Finn and Marta are using artificial intelligence to improve patient outcomes. They are working to understand and correct bias in datasets used for medical research, by generating synthetic data that is representative of underrepresented populations. Having shared this solution with senior management, Finn and Marta were selected to represent Roche at the One Young World Summit in Munich.

After attending, they were inspired to formalise the AI Fairness initiative and established a squad to build a tool that identifies and corrects bias in medical datasets. The tool analyses and provides “bias metrics” for each patient population. It will also provide a solution for this bias, using methods such as the aforementioned synthetic data solution. This AI Fairness tool will help scientists to provide fair research outputs, improving patient outcomes across all populations. They are partnering with another group in Roche to apply their tool to the prediction of adverse events in clinical trials based on patients' data. This research will allow scientists to understand better how predictions for adverse events vary for different demographics, improving the predictive model for the benefit of underrepresented populations.

Finn and Marta are also working with a community in the company responsible for defining a best practice framework for using AI models. By integrating their initiative into this framework and giving guidance on the problem and how to solve it, Finn and Marta aim to make the AI Fairness solution standard practice within the research community at Roche.

"One Young World has inspired me to be bold and ambitious. The Summit and my fellow Ambassadors taught me how passion, expressed through dialogue, can be an impetus for powerful change."