from Hacker News

Predicting sex from retinal fundus photographs using automated deep learning

by dayve on 12/5/22, 5:11 AM with 20 comments

• by interroboink on 12/5/22, 7:02 AM

  Wow, what a roller-coaster that headline was for me.

  I read "predicting sex from rectal fungus...", so I was thinking this was somehow going to relate gut bacteria micro-biomes to peoples' sexual activities.

  Ah no; it's determining a person's sex by looking at their retina.

  I kinda want to read that other imaginary article now, though...

• by matt3210 on 12/5/22, 6:12 AM

  For a second I thought this was going to be "Prediction that two people in the photo or video frame are going to engage in intercourse" with deep learning. That would be an interesting article though.

• by tqi on 12/5/22, 6:42 AM

  > However, deep learning has shown that these algorithms demonstrate capability in tasks which were not previously thought possible. Harnessing this power, new insights into relationships between retinal structure and systemic pathophysiology could expand existing knowledge of disease mechanisms... Here, the physiologic cause and effect relationships are not readily apparent to domain experts21.

  Interesting. I'm curious to learn how a black box model help expand existing knowledge of disease mechanisms? It seems to me that doing so would require the ability to determine what the predictive indicators the model is using are.

• by mrguyorama on 12/5/22, 6:51 PM

  Is this just like nearly every other AI paper like this where the black box actually learned how to distinguish metadata instead? How were the files named, were the female and male pictures collected using two different instruments that would have different noise distributions etc. 9 times out of 10 this kind of paper just turns out to be "We didn't properly normalize our data and reality slipped through", not anything actually meaningful.

• by mobilejdral on 12/5/22, 6:59 PM

  The paper says it both predicts sex, but also says gender. I am guessing what it is actually able to predict is which sex hormone is dominant. For example: If a man with prostate cancer is taking estrogen to suppress T (and hopefully prevent the prostate cancer from growing/spreading) for even six months the colors he will perceive will shift as estrogen is dominant and the cells in his eyes will respond to that change. The paper briefly mentions this: "Others have demonstrated variation of ocular blood flow and have suggested the effect of sex hormones, but thus far, consensus is lacking".

• by RamblingCTO on 12/5/22, 12:11 PM

  Adding to the misread titles, I thought it would predict if you get laid based on your photos and got a bit sad haha.