The ITU-WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health (AI for Health) is an inter-agency collaboration between the

World Health Organization The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. The WHO Constitution states its main objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level o ...

and the ITU, which created a benchmarking framework to assess the accuracy of AI in health. This organization convenes an international network of experts and stakeholders from fields like research, practice, regulation, ethics, public health, etc, that develops guideline documentation and code. The documents address ethics, assessment/evaluation, handling, and regulation of AI for health solutions, covering specific use cases including AI in ophthalmology, histopathology, dentistry, malaria detection, radiology, symptom checker applications, etc. FG-AI4H has established an ad hoc group concerned with digital technologies for health emergencies, including

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The disease quickl ...

. All documentation is public. The idea for the Focus Group came out of the Health Track of the 2018 AI for Good Global Summit. Administratively, FG-AI4H was created by ITU-T Study Group 16. Under

ITU-T The ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) is one of the three sectors (divisions or units) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It is responsible for coordinating standards for telecommunications and Information Commu ...

's framework, participation in Focus Groups is open to anyone from an ITU Member State. The secretariat is provided by the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (under Director

Chaesub Lee Chaesub Lee PhD (Korean: 이재섭) is the Director of ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, the permanent secretariat of the International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) and as such, an Under-Secr ...

). It was first created at the July 2018 meeting with a lifetime of two years, at the July 2020 meeting this was extended for another two years, where the focus group also submitted its deliverables to its parent body. It was also presented at the NeurIPS 2020 health workshop. The outline of the benchmarking framework was published in a commentary in

The Lancet ''The Lancet'' is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal and one of the oldest of its kind. It is also the world's highest-impact academic journal. It was founded in England in 1823. The journal publishes original research articles, ...

as
WHO and ITU establish benchmarking process for artificial intelligence in health

Overview

The benchmarking framework is structured in a cyclical fashion that denoted the continuous improvement nature of AI in health models. Benchmarking-framework

Deliverables

The specifications drawn up by FG-AI4H are titled as: # AI4H ethics considerations # AI4H regulatory considerations# AI4H requirements specification # AI software life cycle specification # Data specification # AI training best practices specification # AI4H evaluation considerations # AI4H scale-up and adoption # AI4H applications and platforms # Use cases of the ITU-WHO Focus Group on AI for Health An overview of the schematic relations is provided as depicted below. FG-AI4H Deliverables Overview DEL00

References

{{Reflist

External links

FG-AI4H main siteOpen Code Initiative
World Health Organization International Telecommunication Union

Overview

Deliverables

See also

References

External links