The ethical governance of Artificial Intelligence health research in Higher Education Institutions (360G-Wellcome-213619_Z_18_Z)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used in health research in areas such as genomics, medical imaging/screening, and health prediction of epidemics and disease outbreaks [1-6]. AI research has the potential to improve health outcomes but raises urgent, complex moral questions, including issues of AI design bias; AI's black-box nature and inherent lack of transparency; and the ownership of algorithms used in AI and the data they produce [6-12]. Such ethical issues challenge Higher Education Institution (HEI) ethical governance systems, which traditionally focus on notions of risk, consent and privacy in human participant research [13]. To preliminarily explore how we can move towards making these governance systems more appropriate for HEI AI health research, this project employs empirical methods to map one aspect of the AI research area, and explore the views, experiences and understandings of relevant scholars on: the usefulness of current HEI governance systems to oversee the types of ethical decisions they make during AI research; collaborating with the private sector and associated ethical concerns; their responsibility towards post-research/implementation issues associated with AI; and the need for specific ‘health research’ ethics governance. The goal is to make/disseminate preliminary recommendations to improve HEI ethical governance for AI health research.