Ethics by Design: A Lifecycle Framework for Trustworthy AI in Medical Imaging From Transparent Data Governance to Clinically Validated Deployment

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical imaging raises crucial ethical concerns at every stage of its development, from data collection to deployment. Addressing these concerns is essential for ensuring that AI systems are developed and implemented in a manner that respects patient rights and promotes fairness. This study aims to explore the ethical implications of AI in medical imaging, focusing on five key stages: data collection, data processing, model training, model evaluation, and deployment. The goal is to evaluate how these stages adhere to fundamental ethical principles, including data privacy, fairness, transparency, accountability, and autonomy. An analytical approach was employed to examine the ethical challenges associated with each stage of AI development. We reviewed existing literature, guidelines, and regulations concerning AI ethics in healthcare and identified critical ethical issues at each stage. The study outlines specific inquiries and principles for each phase of AI development. The findings highlight key ethical issues: ensuring patient consent and anonymization during data collection, addressing biases in model training, ensuring transparency and fairness during model evaluation, and the importance of continuous ethical assessments during deployment. The analysis also emphasizes the impact of accessibility issues on different stakeholders, including private, public, and third-party entities. The study concludes that ethical considerations must be systematically integrated into each stage of AI development in medical imaging. By adhering to these ethical principles, AI systems can be made more robust, transparent, and aligned with patient care and data control. We propose tailored ethical inquiries and strategies to support the creation of ethically sound AI systems in medical imaging.