this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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162
AI Determines Sex of Person From Brain Scans - Neuroscience News (neurosciencenews.com)
submitted 9 months ago by Squire1039@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world
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This article describes a new study using AI to identify sex differences in the brain with over 90% accuracy.

Key findings:

  • An AI model successfully distinguished between male and female brains based on scans, suggesting inherent sex-based brain variations.
  • The model focused on specific brain networks like the default mode, striatum, and limbic networks, potentially linked to cognitive functions and behaviors.
  • These findings could lead to personalized medicine approaches by considering sex differences in developing treatments for brain disorders.

Additional points:

  • The study may help settle a long-standing debate about the existence of reliable sex differences in the brain.
  • Previous research failed to find consistent brain indicators of sex.
  • Researchers emphasize that the study doesn't explain the cause of these differences.
  • The research team plans to make the AI model publicly available for further research on brain-behavior connections.

Overall, the study highlights the potential of AI in uncovering previously undetectable brain differences with potential implications for personalized medicine.

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[–] parens@programming.dev 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There are short men and tall women, so you shouldn’t rely on just that.

I don't think that's a fair comparison. Height is a single value. If you trained an AI on that, it would be guessing. A brain has many, many more parameters to take into consideration when going into an artificial neural network.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That just makes my point stronger, though. The basic gist of what I was saying is that even if there is a statistical clustering of data into two groups that seem correlated with some category, that doesn't mean that you can absolutely rely on that data to classify people into those categories.

[–] parens@programming.dev 1 points 8 months ago

The more data you have, the more confident you can be that the resulting categorisation is correct. If you're saying this is incorrect, I disagree with you. If you're saying absolute confidence that the categories themselves are correct is impossible, then I agree with you