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Main Authors: Gao, Yicheng, Hao, Jinkui, Zhou, Bo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16373
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author Gao, Yicheng
Hao, Jinkui
Zhou, Bo
author_facet Gao, Yicheng
Hao, Jinkui
Zhou, Bo
contents Recent advancements in deep learning have shown transformative potential in medical imaging, yet concerns about fairness persist due to performance disparities across demographic subgroups. Existing methods aim to address these biases by mitigating sensitive attributes in image data; however, these attributes often carry clinically relevant information, and their removal can compromise model performance-a highly undesirable outcome. To address this challenge, we propose Fair Re-fusion After Disentanglement (FairREAD), a novel, simple, and efficient framework that mitigates unfairness by re-integrating sensitive demographic attributes into fair image representations. FairREAD employs orthogonality constraints and adversarial training to disentangle demographic information while using a controlled re-fusion mechanism to preserve clinically relevant details. Additionally, subgroup-specific threshold adjustments ensure equitable performance across demographic groups. Comprehensive evaluations on a large-scale clinical X-ray dataset demonstrate that FairREAD significantly reduces unfairness metrics while maintaining diagnostic accuracy, establishing a new benchmark for fairness and performance in medical image classification.
format Preprint
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FairREAD: Re-fusing Demographic Attributes after Disentanglement for Fair Medical Image Classification
Gao, Yicheng
Hao, Jinkui
Zhou, Bo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Recent advancements in deep learning have shown transformative potential in medical imaging, yet concerns about fairness persist due to performance disparities across demographic subgroups. Existing methods aim to address these biases by mitigating sensitive attributes in image data; however, these attributes often carry clinically relevant information, and their removal can compromise model performance-a highly undesirable outcome. To address this challenge, we propose Fair Re-fusion After Disentanglement (FairREAD), a novel, simple, and efficient framework that mitigates unfairness by re-integrating sensitive demographic attributes into fair image representations. FairREAD employs orthogonality constraints and adversarial training to disentangle demographic information while using a controlled re-fusion mechanism to preserve clinically relevant details. Additionally, subgroup-specific threshold adjustments ensure equitable performance across demographic groups. Comprehensive evaluations on a large-scale clinical X-ray dataset demonstrate that FairREAD significantly reduces unfairness metrics while maintaining diagnostic accuracy, establishing a new benchmark for fairness and performance in medical image classification.
title FairREAD: Re-fusing Demographic Attributes after Disentanglement for Fair Medical Image Classification
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16373