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    "story_id": "mp-2026-11-09-008",
    "source_story_id": "tmp-story-histopathology-demographic-signals",
    "edition_id": "mp-2026-11-09-morning-0122",
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    "position": 8,
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    "section": "research",
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    "headline": "Demographic Signals Persist Across the Slide Archive",
    "slug": "demographic-signals-persist-across-the-slide-archive",
    "dek": "A 1.3-million-image map finds age, sex and self-reported-race associations remain detectable across many organs and diagnoses.",
    "summary": "A 1.3-million-image map finds age, sex and self-reported-race associations remain detectable across many organs and diagnoses.",
    "body_text": "The study analyzes 1.3 million routine hematoxylin-and-eosin whole-slide images from 257,322 patients across 25 organs using foundation-model representations and multiple-instance learning. Across 69 organ-demographic combinations, the authors report mean AUROCs of 0.828 for sex, 0.733 for age group and 0.662 for self-reported race, with large variation by organ. Balancing demographic classes changed performance relatively little, and grouping training data by diagnosis still left several signals detectable. The paper offers candidate histological and contextual explanations rather than causal conclusions. Its practical warning is that pathology models may encode demographic-associated shortcuts even when those attributes are not the intended target.",
    "why_it_matters": "A 1.3-million-image map finds age, sex and self-reported-race associations remain detectable across many organs and diagnoses.",
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      "Its practical warning is that pathology models may encode demographic-associated shortcuts even when those attributes are not the intended target."
    ],
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    "first_published_at": "2026-11-09T09:00:00.000-05:00",
    "modified_at": "2026-11-09T09:00:00.000-05:00",
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        "text": "A 1.3-million-image map finds age, sex and self-reported-race associations remain detectable across many organs and diagnoses.",
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        "qualification": "Its practical warning is that pathology models may encode demographic-associated shortcuts even when those attributes are not the intended target."
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    "tags": [
      "computational pathology",
      "demographics",
      "shortcut learning"
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  "sources": [
    {
      "source_id": "source-2026-11-09-008",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2611.09851, original v1",
      "publisher": "arXiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09851v1",
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      "source_type": "primary_research",
      "is_primary_source": true,
      "published_at": "2026-11-06T13:34:51.000-05:00",
      "accessed_at": "2026-11-09T08:25:54.496-05:00",
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    "name": "The Machine Press",
    "url": "https://themachinepress.com",
    "description": "A daily newspaper for the age of artificial intelligence."
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  "cite_this_report": {
    "title": "Demographic Signals Persist Across the Slide Archive",
    "publisher": "The Machine Press",
    "published_at": "2026-11-09T09:00:00.000-05:00",
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