Active Informed Consent to Boost the Application of Machine Learning in Medicine

TL;DR

This paper introduces Active Informed Consent, a hybrid legal-technological approach designed to enhance data collection for machine learning in medicine while ensuring compliance with European privacy laws.

Contribution

It proposes a novel Active Informed Consent framework that combines legal and technological aspects to improve data gathering for medical machine learning applications.

Findings

AIC aligns with European privacy regulations.

AIC effectively increases data collection for machine learning.

The framework ensures legal compliance in data acquisition.

Abstract

Machine Learning may push research in precision medicine to unprecedented heights. To succeed, machine learning needs a large amount of data, often including personal data. Therefore, machine learning applied to precision medicine is on a cliff edge: if it does not learn to fly, it will deeply fall down. In this paper, we present Active Informed Consent (AIC) as a novel hybrid legal-technological tool to foster the gathering of a large amount of data for machine learning. We carefully analyzed the compliance of this technological tool to the legal intricacies protecting the privacy of European Citizens.