15.11.2021

Safe AI systems and their certification in the healthcare sector

Carl Zeiss Foundation funds research project at the University of Tübingen with five million euros

Modern deep-learning systems in healthcare have the potential to make diagnostic decisions of similar quality to treating physicians. However, there are concerns about the transparency, robustness, fairness and reliability of these systems. The project “Certification and Foundations of Safe Machine Learning Systems in Healthcare” by a research group at the University of Tübingen aims to address these issues. Potential trade-offs of various aspects (fairness, accuracy, interpretability, and privacy) as well as their ethical implications are being explored using concrete applications in the healthcare sector. The Carl Zeiss Foundation is now funding the project as part of its “Scientific Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence” program with five million euros over six years.

“We not only want to improve the fundamentals of machine learning, but also to establish guidelines for certification of such AI systems, thereby enabling safe use in medicine,” says the project’s spokesperson, Professor Matthias Hein. “The AI research environment in Tübingen offers ideal conditions for this, as the expertise required for this is available here in a unique breadth in Germany. We are very pleased and grateful for the trust of the Carl Zeiss Foundation. This funding decisively advances research at the interface of AI and medicine at the University of Tübingen in structural terms.”

Project partners are the Departments of Radiology and Ophthalmology at the University Hospital Tübingen (UKT). TÜV SÜD and TÜV AI.LAB will be involved as cooperation partners in the development of certification protocols. In addition, three medical start-ups are supporting the project with data and concrete use cases: the two Tübingen-based companies AIRAmed and eye2you, both members of the Cyber Valley Start-up Network, and the Berlin-based company Vara, which is developing AI systems to detect breast cancer.

After a  press release, University of Tübingen, 11.11.2021