I don’t keep up with horse racing as much as I used to, though there’s still a blog I visit. Partially because I have very mixed feelings about the sport, but also frankly all the scandals around Bob Baffert (a big name trainer) and the Triple Crown races and his barn in general really showed the underside of the sport to the public and made me rethink my relationship with it. That being said, I ran across this article recently about using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect minor changes in gait with race horses in training and thought it was fascinating.
Before I go any further, there is a difference between AI technologies and generative AI like ChatGPT. The later (ChatGPT) is a resource guzzling plagarism machine. I don’t think I can make my distaste of it any clearer and that’s not what I’m talking about here. AI as an algorithm takes a look at data, vast amounts of data, and then compares it to find anomalies. In treating breast cancer, for example, it can look at mammogram images and find the smallest deviation, even before the human eye of a radiologist could see it. (Here’s a National Library of Medicine article discussing the possibility: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10625863/)
In the case of these thoroughbred athletes, the data from thousands of workouts and races is analyzed to find deviations in gait patterns. My guess is much like your fitness tracker wearable uses GPS and motion to determine step count (and we’ve found that it can be “faked” by petting kitties too!), these devices utilize similar techniques to determine concussion on the horse’s body from each step, speed, pace, etc. When a horse is “off” or lame in a leg, even before we could witness it by watching the horse move there will be tiny changes in how that leg is moved, how the hoof hits the ground, etc.
In the case cited in the article, the trainer notes that the horse had a couple of blips on the sensor which warranted more detailed imaging (just like the mammography images seen with AI can send someone for more detailed screenings), and they found an issue in this horse’s front leg. It’s still up to the human to make the decision of what to do with the horse, or with the findings in the breast cancer screening. AI in these cases just gives you more information.
I thought it was a fascinating application, and while I’m aware that AI is a very hot button issue. i have strong feelings about generative AI if you can’t tell from my wording in an earlier paragraph. There is a use for the technology in some capacity. Our job as humans, is to thread the needle of finding ethical uses of the technology, and keeping a race horse from breaking down, in my view, certain falls into that category.
