Artificial Knees

The x-rays of osteoarthritic human knees on the top row are entirely fake – a research team generated them using an artificially intelligent algorithm – while those on the bottom row are genuine. Or, wait, is it the other way around? The point is, it’s impossible to tell, even for medical experts. Why have scientists gone to the effort of creating fake X-rays, you might ask. Rest assured, there’s more to it than simply trying to fool orthopaedic doctors. Having access to large amounts of patient data can be extremely useful for developing diagnostic, classification, and educational tools, but sharing genuine medical data can be a highly bureaucratic process. The idea, then, is that if AI can generate fake data of such high quality as to be indistinguishable from real patient data, it could be used to help build valuable tools without the hassle of untangling all the red tape.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Fabi Prezja and colleagues
• Faculty of Information Technology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Scientific Reports, November 2022