A team from the University of Glasgow’s James Watt School of Engineering has won new funding for a project to help examine gender bias in healthcare AI and find ways to ensure AI-supported treatment remains equitable.

Currently, scientists around the globe are looking at how cutting-edge sensors that track vital signs can be combined with artificial intelligence.

As Dr Nour Ghadban, a research fellow at the University of Glasgow and the project’s principal investigator, further explained: “New sensors linked with artificial intelligence could offer potentially transformational opportunities to improve the way that we monitor patient wellbeing.

“However, we can only reap those benefits if we can be sure that the AI systems we use to achieve them are up to the task. We know that all kinds of human bias across race, class, gender, and more can be unwittingly incorporated into AI decision-making tools if the proper care isn’t taken when they are being trained on real-world data.”

To help tackle bias, the University of Glasgow researchers will work to develop a new framework to balance gender-related behaviour in AI monitoring systems over the next 18 months.

The team will collect healthcare data from 30 men and 30 women study volunteers using radar sensors. The data will be used to train a newly developed AI architecture, which will analyse the results of the radar monitoring.

Separate models will then be trained on the data, comparing performance and highlighting any biases in the AI’s performance – which can be adjusted for using statistical models and mitigation techniques.

Dr Julien Le Kernec, from the James Watt School of Engineering, is the project’s supervisor. He said: “By the end of our research, we expect to have created a robust demonstration of how gender balance can be embedded in the heart of any future AI healthcare monitoring systems.

“We hope the outputs from this project will help guide the future development of this very promising technology and ensure that the AI which supports it is fair and balanced for the many diverse groups of patients who will benefit from it.”

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The project is supported by €9,500 (£8,200) in new funding from the Women and Science Chair at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL, supported by the L’Oréal Foundation, Generali France, La Poste, Amundi and the Talan Group.

Dr Ghadban, originally from Syria, joined the University of Glasgow’s James Watt School of Engineering in August 2022 with the support of the Cara Fellowship Programme. Cara (the Council for At-Risk Academics) provides urgently needed help to academics in immediate danger.

The team leading the research are Dr Nour Ghadban, Mostafa Elsayed, Professor Jonathan Cooper, and Dr Julien Le Kernec.