Both AI and radiologists can get fooled by tampered medical images, study finds

Shandong Wu, Department of Radiology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and colleagues performed a study investigate the behaviors of an AI diagnosis model under adversarial images generated by Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) models and to evaluate the effects on human experts when visually identifying potential adversarial images. 

The GAN model makes intentional modifications to the diagnosis-sensitive contents of mammogram images in deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of breast cancer.

In the authors' experiments, the adversarial samples fool the AI-CAD model to output a wrong diagnosis on 69.1% of the cases that are initially correctly classified by the AI-CAD model. Five breast imaging radiologists visually identify 29%-71% of the adversarial samples. 

"Our experiments showed that highly plausible adversarial samples can be generated on mammogram images by advanced GAN algorithms, and they can induce a deep learning AI model to output a wrong diagnosis of breast cancer," wrote the authors.

"Certified human radiologists can identify such adversarial samples, but they may not be reliable to safely detect all potential adversarial samples, where an education process showed promise to improve their performance in recognizing the adversarial images," they explained. "This poses an imperative need for continuing research on the medical AI model's safety issues and for developing potential defensive solutions against adversarial attacks"

Reference:

Zhou, Q., Zuley, M., Guo, Y. et al. A machine and human reader study on AI diagnosis model safety under attacks of adversarial images. Nat Commun 12, 7281 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27577-x