Ethical Medical Image Synthesis

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of ethical considerations in medical image synthesis, analyzing its intrinsic limitations, risks, and proposing practical guidelines and oversight to ensure responsible development and application.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis of ethical issues in MISyn, identifies intrinsic limits, and offers practical recommendations and case studies for ethical practice.

Findings

Synthetic images lack grounding in real medical phenomena.

Unacknowledged synthetic images can cause misinformation and bias.

Ethical guidelines can improve MISyn practices.

Abstract

The task of ethical Medical Image Synthesis (MISyn) is to ensure that the MISyn techniques are researched and developed ethically throughout their entire lifecycle, which is essential to prevent the negative impacts of MISyn. To address the ever-increasing needs and requirements for ethical practice of MISyn research and development, we first conduct a theoretical analysis that identifies the key properties of ethical MISyn and intrinsic limits of MISyn. We identify that synthetic images lack inherent grounding in real medical phenomena, cannot fully represent the training medical images, and inevitably introduce new distribution shifts and biases. Ethical risks can arise from not acknowledging the intrinsic limits and weaknesses of synthetic images compared to medical images, with the extreme form manifested as misinformation of MISyn that substitutes synthetic images for medical images without acknowledgment. The resulting ethical harms include eroding trust in the medical imaging dataset environment and causing algorithmic discrimination towards stakeholders and the public. To facilitate collective efforts towards ethical MISyn within and outside the medical image analysis community, we then propose practical supports for ethical practice in MISyn based on the theoretical analysis, including ethical practice recommendations that adapt the existing technical standards, problem formulation, design, and evaluation practice of MISyn to the ethical challenges; and oversight recommendations to facilitate checks and balances from stakeholders and the public. We also present two case studies that demonstrate how to apply the ethical practice recommendations in practice, and identify gaps between existing practice and the ethical practice recommendations.