Position Paper: Building Trust in Synthetic Data for Clinical AI
It addresses trust barriers for clinicians in adopting synthetic data for healthcare AI, but is incremental as it builds on existing research without introducing new methods.
This position paper tackles the problem of limited clinical adoption of synthetic medical data due to trust issues, showing through brain tumor segmentation that data quality, diversity, and proportion directly impact trust in AI models.
Deep generative models and synthetic medical data have shown significant promise in addressing key challenges in healthcare, such as privacy concerns, data bias, and the scarcity of realistic datasets. While research in this area has grown rapidly and demonstrated substantial theoretical potential, its practical adoption in clinical settings remains limited. Despite the benefits synthetic data offers, questions surrounding its reliability and credibility persist, leading to a lack of trust among clinicians. This position paper argues that fostering trust in synthetic medical data is crucial for its clinical adoption. It aims to spark a discussion on the viability of synthetic medical data in clinical practice, particularly in the context of current advancements in AI. We present empirical evidence from brain tumor segmentation to demonstrate that the quality, diversity, and proportion of synthetic data directly impact trust in clinical AI models. Our findings provide insights to improve the deployment and acceptance of synthetic data-driven AI systems in real-world clinical workflows.