Health Equity in Pediatric AI: New JACR White Paper Offers Solutions

The American College of Radiology® (ACR®) Pediatric Artificial Intelligence (AI) workgroup recently published a white paper to educate the radiology community about health equity issues related to pediatric AI.

Use of Artificial Intelligence in Radiology: Impact on Pediatric Patients, published in the Journal of American College of Radiology (JACR®) is intended to improve the understanding of relevant pediatric AI issues and offer solutions that address inadequacies in pediatric AI development.

The paper stresses the importance of ensuring AI is safe, reliable and effective for children.

The workgroup suggests addressing this current unmet need in several ways:

• Assess existing adult AI algorithms in pediatric cohorts prior to potential use in children.
• Incentivize vendors to develop AI using suitable pediatric data, either in separate pediatric models or in combined adult and pediatric datasets.
• Encourage transparency in regulatory bodies regarding the inclusion of pediatric patients in AI datasets to ensure correct application of AI based on customary metrics in pediatric care (e.g., age).

The physiology, anatomy and diagnoses of pediatric patients vary widely from their adult counterparts, yet only three percent of the >200 AI Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) listed in ACR’s online catalog indicate they are intended for pediatric use.

The workgroup, within the ACR Informatics Commission, is sponsoring the Image IntelliGently™ campaign to raise awareness of the need for improved pediatric AI implementation and governance. The group is charged, through stakeholder consensus, with providing guidance to ensure that all pediatric patients will have equitable access to clinically meaningful AI as it becomes increasingly available for use in adults.

For more information, contact the ACR Data Science Institute™ at DSI@acr.org.