Slicing Through Bias: Explaining Performance Gaps in Medical Image Analysis using Slice Discovery Methods

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Olesen, Vincent, Weng, Nina, Feragen, Aasa, Petersen, Eike
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866913558757900288
author Olesen, Vincent
Weng, Nina
Feragen, Aasa
Petersen, Eike
author_facet Olesen, Vincent
Weng, Nina
Feragen, Aasa
Petersen, Eike
contents Machine learning models have achieved high overall accuracy in medical image analysis. However, performance disparities on specific patient groups pose challenges to their clinical utility, safety, and fairness. This can affect known patient groups - such as those based on sex, age, or disease subtype - as well as previously unknown and unlabeled groups. Furthermore, the root cause of such observed performance disparities is often challenging to uncover, hindering mitigation efforts. In this paper, to address these issues, we leverage Slice Discovery Methods (SDMs) to identify interpretable underperforming subsets of data and formulate hypotheses regarding the cause of observed performance disparities. We introduce a novel SDM and apply it in a case study on the classification of pneumothorax and atelectasis from chest x-rays. Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of SDMs in hypothesis formulation and yields an explanation of previously observed but unexplained performance disparities between male and female patients in widely used chest X-ray datasets and models. Our findings indicate shortcut learning in both classification tasks, through the presence of chest drains and ECG wires, respectively. Sex-based differences in the prevalence of these shortcut features appear to cause the observed classification performance gap, representing a previously underappreciated interaction between shortcut learning and model fairness analyses.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_12142
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Slicing Through Bias: Explaining Performance Gaps in Medical Image Analysis using Slice Discovery Methods
Olesen, Vincent
Weng, Nina
Feragen, Aasa
Petersen, Eike
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computers and Society
Machine learning models have achieved high overall accuracy in medical image analysis. However, performance disparities on specific patient groups pose challenges to their clinical utility, safety, and fairness. This can affect known patient groups - such as those based on sex, age, or disease subtype - as well as previously unknown and unlabeled groups. Furthermore, the root cause of such observed performance disparities is often challenging to uncover, hindering mitigation efforts. In this paper, to address these issues, we leverage Slice Discovery Methods (SDMs) to identify interpretable underperforming subsets of data and formulate hypotheses regarding the cause of observed performance disparities. We introduce a novel SDM and apply it in a case study on the classification of pneumothorax and atelectasis from chest x-rays. Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of SDMs in hypothesis formulation and yields an explanation of previously observed but unexplained performance disparities between male and female patients in widely used chest X-ray datasets and models. Our findings indicate shortcut learning in both classification tasks, through the presence of chest drains and ECG wires, respectively. Sex-based differences in the prevalence of these shortcut features appear to cause the observed classification performance gap, representing a previously underappreciated interaction between shortcut learning and model fairness analyses.
title Slicing Through Bias: Explaining Performance Gaps in Medical Image Analysis using Slice Discovery Methods
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12142