MIT Assistant Professor of EECS and Jameel Clinic Principal Investigator Marzyeh Ghassemi spoke with New York Times Opinion Contributor Maia Szalavitz on how the task of addiction prediction and prevention could potentially perpetuate biases in medical decision making. Learn more
For those in need of one, an organ transplant is a matter of life and death.
Every year, the medical procedure gives thousands of people with advanced or end-stage diseases extended life. This “second chance” is heavily dependent on the availability, compatibility, and proximity of a precious resource that can’t be simply bought, grown, or manufactured — at least not yet.
Instead, organs must be given — cut from one body and implanted into another. And because living organ donation is only viable in certain cases, many organs are only available for donation after the donor’s death.
Unsurprisingly, the logistical and ethical complexity of distributing a limited number of transplant organs to a growing wait list of patients has received much attention. There’s an important part of the process that has received less focus, however, and which may hold significant untapped potential: organ procurement itself. Learn more
AI applications for health care should be designed to function well in different settings and across different populations, says Marzyeh Ghassemi, PhD (Video), whose work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) focuses on creating “healthy” machine learning (ML) models that are “robust, private, and fair.” The way AI-generated clinical advice is presented to physicians is also important for reducing harms, according to Ghassemi, who is an assistant professor at MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science. And, she says, developers should be aware that they have a responsibility to clinicians and patients who could one day be affected by their tools. Learn more
