Emerging Ethical Issues for DataLakes

拟议的项目是与创新英国资助的PathLAKE联盟的合作伙伴关系，该联盟正在将计算技术应用于癌症诊断。PATHLAKE是Innovate UK资助的5个医学成像和数字病理学卓越中心之一。它是大学研究人员、NHS信托基金和商业组织之间的伙伴关系。沃里克大学正在领导PathLAKE的计算部门，与主要合作伙伴考文垂和沃里克郡NHS信托大学医院、皇家飞利浦以及贝尔法斯特、牛津和诺丁汉的教学医院和大学的合作伙伴和专家合作，重点研究乳腺癌、前列腺癌、肺癌和结肠癌。参与的数字实验室汇集了与目标癌症相关的组织的注释全载玻片图像（WSIs），并欢迎联盟以外的商业数字科学公司的应用程序，以训练和测试其数据的算法。储存WSIs的“数据湖”所涉及的内容引发了伦理问题。例如，原始组织来自何处，以及在何种知情同意制度下（如果有的话）？这些问题说明了在医学影像研究和发展的数据伦理学，组织伦理学和一般的研究伦理学的交叉点。从数据湖中提取数据，特别是使用在Pathlake WSI上训练和测试的算法开发营利性应用程序，会引发公私合作伙伴关系伦理方面的进一步问题，特别是NHSX为数据驱动研究开发的代码所预期的问题。还有一些伦理和概念问题与湖中的数据是否真正匿名或去识别有关，因为将算法的临床益处返回给参与NHS信托的组织捐赠者可能取决于（选择性和临时性）去识别。由于个人数据的概念与身份的可推断性有关，并且由于计算病理学中涉及的超级计算能力可能允许远远超出人类能力的非常微妙的推断，因此WSI数据是否是个人的还远不明显。该项目将对所有这些问题进行映射和初步讨论，调查结果将分发给卓越中心，创新英国和英国政府人工智能办公室，以及信息专员办公室和NHS研究伦理委员会。

The proposed project is a partnership with the Innovate UK-funded PathLAKE Consortium, which is applying computational techniques to cancer diagnostics. PATHLAKE is one of 5 Centres of Excellence in medical imaging and digital pathology funded by Innovate UK. It is a partnership between university researchers, NHS trusts and commercial organizations. The University of Warwick is leading the computational arm of PathLAKE, working together with partners and experts at the lead partner University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, Royal Philips and teaching hospitals and universities at Belfast, Oxford and Nottingham, focussing on breast, prostate, lung and colon cancers. The digital labs involved have pooled annotated whole slide images (WSIs) of tissue relevant to the targeted cancers and have welcomed applications from commercial digital science companies outside the consortium to train and test algorithms with its data. Ethical issues are raised by what is involved in stocking the "datalake" of WSIs. For example, where does the original tissue come from and under what informed consent regime if any? These issues illustrate the intersection in medical imagery research and development of data ethics, tissue ethics and general research ethics. Extracting data from the data-lake, especially where it leads to the development of for-profit apps using algorithms trained and tested on Pathlake WSIs, raises further issues in the ethics of public-private partnerships, specifically those anticipated by Codes developed for data-driven research by NHSX. There are also ethical and conceptual issues connected with whether data in the lake are truly anonymised or de-identified when returning clinical benefit from algorithms to tissue donors from the participating NHS trusts may depend on (selective and temporary) de-identification. Since the concept of personal data is tied to the inferability of identity, and since super computing power involved in computational pathology may allow for very subtle inferences far beyond human capacities, it is far from obvious whether WSI data is personal or not. A mapping and preliminary discussion of all of these issues will result from the project, and findings will be distributed to the Centres of Excellence, Innovate UK, and the UK Government Office for AI, as well as the Office of the Information Commissioner, and NHS Research Ethics Committees.