A machine and human reader study on AI diagnosis model safety under attacks of adversarial images

While active efforts are advancing medical artificial intelligence (AI) model development and clinical translation, safety issues of the AI models emerge, but little research has been done. We perform a study to investigate the behaviors of an AI diagnosis model under adversarial images generated by Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) models and to evaluate the effects on human experts when visually identifying potential adversarial images. Our GAN model makes intentional modifications to the diagnosis-sensitive contents of mammogram images in deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of breast cancer. In our experiments the adversarial samples fool the AI-CAD model to output a wrong diagnosis on 69.1% of the cases that are initially correctly classified by the AI-CAD model. Five breast imaging radiologists visually identify 29%-71% of the adversarial samples. Our study suggests an imperative need for continuing research on medical AI model’s safety issues and for developing potential defensive solutions against adversarial attacks.