[airza]

The article is pretty fascinating and I recommend that you actually read it. For example:

>"We found that deep learning models effectively predicted patient race even when the bone density information was removed for both MXR (AUC value for Black patients: 0·960 [CI 0·958–0·963]) and CXP (AUC value for Black patients: 0·945 [CI 0·94–0·949]) datasets. The average pixel thresholds for different tissues did not produce any usable signal to detect race (AUC 0·5). These findings suggest that race information was not localised within the brightest pixels within the image (eg, in the bone)."

[shakna]

One of the primary ways of identifying possible race from bones in anthropology involved calculating ratio from lengths. Good for an estimate or fallback, but not completely accurate. Removing the density would do absolutely nothing to obscure that method. Any image will allow you to measure ratio of bones sizes.

[jcranberry]

So just from the silhouette of a skeleton, if I understand that correctly?

[airza]

Even after being munged into a nearly-uniform gray by high pass the effect seems pretty robust.