SciArt Work: The Box

Artist | Fiona Smith (UK)

Art Form | Interactive SciArt Installation

Motivation | The potential benefits of utilising AI technology in healthcare are vast but there are important practical, technological, ethical and legal implications that need to be addressed in order to safeguard patients. The BOX is an interactive installation that explores the 'black box' aspect of AI technology and asks “If we feed the AI with incomplete or biased data - can we expect it to suggest reasonable treatment plans?".

Methodology & Implementation | Visitors to The BOX installation will be taken on an interactive journey through an alternative hospital clinic. Acting as patients, they will be scanned and then presented with their test results to The BOX. Through a dynamic light display, The BOX will then communicate the treatment plan it has decided for each patient. Once processed, the visitors will be given the opportunity to interrogate the knowledge base used by The BOX to make its decision.

Scientific background | The STEAM Imaging V creator residency brought together the artist Fiona Smith, scientists at Fraunhofer MEVIS, and students from the International Fraunhofer Talent School Bremen and the Walle School Center to discuss the important ethical, legal and practical implications of implementing AI technology in healthcare. Building AI models that make accurate predictions for patients requires diverse training data sets that are representative of the test population. In some cases it might be possible to continuously update the model with new training data as it becomes available, but how do you regulate a model where performance is continuously changing? How do you detect when the accuracy of the predictions being made by a deployed model is changing or showing differential performance across different patient groups? These questions and more are explored with The BOX, which has been produced in collaboration with the Institute for Design Informatics, Edinburgh, and premieres at the Inspace Gallery as part of the 2024 Edinburgh Science Festival.

Credits | The BOX is the outcome of the Creator Residency ‘STEAM Imaging V – Holding the ‘Digital’ in Medicine to Account,’ hosted by the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS (DE), in collaboration with the Institute for Design Informatics (UK), the International Fraunhofer Talent School Bremen and the School Center Walle (DE), supported by Ars Electronica (AT). The project was made possible with the generous help of Bianka Hofmann, Miriam Walsh, Mark Kobine, Peter Bentley, Malcolm Cruickshank, Paul Charlton, Hans Meine, Matthias Günther, Rieke Alpers, Anna Rörich, Valentin Kraft, Susanne Diekmann, Roxanne Wong and Nicola Osborne.