Objective
To assess the effects of the current use of artificial intelligence (AI) in women’s health on health equity, specifically in primary and secondary prevention efforts among women.
Methods
Two databases, Scopus and PubMed, were used to conduct this narrative review. The keywords included “artificial intelligence,” “machine learning,” “women’s health,” “screen,” “risk factor,” and “prevent,” and papers were filtered only to include those about AI models that general practitioners may use.
Results
Of the 18 articles reviewed, 8 articles focused on risk factor modeling under primary prevention, and 10 articles focused on screening tools under secondary prevention. Gaps were found in the ability of AI models to train using large, diverse datasets that were reflective of the population it is intended for. Lack of these datasets was frequently identified as a limitation in the papers reviewed (n = 7).
Conclusions
Minority, low-income women have poor access to health care and are, therefore, not well represented in the datasets AI uses to train, which risks introducing bias in its output. To mitigate this, more datasets should be developed to validate AI models, and AI in women’s health should expand to include conditions that affect men and women to provide a gendered lens on these conditions. Public health, medical, and technology entities need to collaborate to regulate the development and use of AI in health care at a standard that reduces bias.