CHASE2023 recording: Racial disparities in pulse oximetry cannot be fixed with race-based correction
Channel: Neal Patwari
Date: 20/06/2023

This is a recording of the presentation of our paper, "Racial disparities in pulse oximetry cannot be fixed with race-based correction", at the 8th IEEE/ACM Conference on Connected Health: Applications, Systems, and Engineering Technologies, on June 23, 2023. We use a large data set of pulse oximeter (SpO2) measurements and (ground truth) lab arterial oxygenation measurements to evaluate the error variance of SpO2 as a function of patient racial group. The data shows that error variance is significantly higher for patients racialized as Black and Asian, and the paper discusses potential reasons for this higher variance. Researchers have suggested race-based correction of SpO2, that is, subtract the previously estimated bias as a function of race.  But our paper shows that this is not sufficient to close the gap in the performance of detecting hypoxemia from SpO2 measurements.