Skin lesions can be an early indicator of a wide range of infectious and other diseases. The use of deep learning (DL) models to diagnose skin lesions has great potential in assisting clinicians with prescreening patients. However, these models often learn biases inherent in training data, which can lead to a performance gap in the diagnosis of people with light and/or dark skin tones. To the best of our knowledge, limited work has been done on identifying, let alone reducing, model bias in skin disease classification and segmentation. In this paper, we examine DL fairness and demonstrate the existence of bias in classification and segmentation models for subpopulations with darker skin tones compared to individuals with lighter skin tones, for specific diseases including Lyme, Tinea Corporis and Herpes Zoster. Then, we propose a novel preprocessing, data alteration method, called EdgeMixup, to improve model fairness with a linear combination of an input skin lesion image and a corresponding a predicted edge detection mask combined with color saturation alteration. For the task of skin disease classification, EdgeMixup outperforms much more complex competing methods such as adversarial approaches, achieving a 10.99% reduction in accuracy gap between light and dark skin tone samples, and resulting in 8.4% improved performance for an underrepresented subpopulation.

该篇论文通过使用 EdgeMixup 数据预处理算法实现了对深度学习模型在诊断皮肤病方面存在的模型偏差进行纠正，并对 Lyme，Tinea Corporis 和 Herpes Zoster 等病变诊断模型的性能进行了比较和分析，其中 EdgeMixup 在减少光之间和暗之间皮肤样本分类准确率差距方面显示出显著的表现优势。

EdgeMixup: 改进皮肤病分类和分割的公平性