Dermatology

Comprehensive Summary

This paper addresses algorithmic fairness in skin cancer diagnosis, focusing on performance disparities across different skin tone groups. Due to the entanglement of lesion characteristics and skin tone in visual data, existing bias-suppression methods are inherently constrained. To address this, the authors propose a framework that influences image-text pairs to separate lesion conditions from skin tone. Their model comprises a shared text encoder and two specialized image encoders, which align separate image features with lesion and skin tone descriptions. By using techniques such as measuring the semantic distances between lesion and skin color in both image and text modalities, the framework achieved optimal representation alignment. Experiments on two benchmark datasets (PAD-UFES-20 and Fitzpatrick17k), which include a wide spectrum of skin tones, show that their method improves classification accuracy and fairness across various evaluation parameters. Specifically, the framework improved classification accuracy by 3.8% and reduced fairness disparity by 7.2% compared to baseline methods.

Outcomes and Implications

This study highlights the importance of addressing fairness in automated skin cancer diagnosis by explicitly disentangling lesion and skin tone features. Past work has shown that individuals with darker skin tones face lower diagnostic accuracy, illustrating a major fairness gap in dermatology. The proposed FairDITA framework improves diagnostic accuracy, and also reduces disparities across skin tone groups. These findings suggest that future medical AI systems should integrate fairness-aware representation learning, particularly in dermatology where visual attributes are closely tied to sensitive characteristics.

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© 2025 AIIM. Created by AIIM IT Team

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© 2025 AIIM. Created by AIIM IT Team