Deep learning models have achieved great success in automating skin lesion diagnosis. However, the ethnic disparity in these models' predictions, where lesions on darker skin types are usually underrepresented and have lower diagnosis accuracy, receives little attention. In this paper, we propose FairDisCo, a disentanglement deep learning framework with contrastive learning that utilizes an additional network branch to remove sensitive attributes, i.e. skin-type information from representations for fairness and another contrastive branch to enhance feature extraction. We compare FairDisCo to three fairness methods, namely, resampling, reweighting, and attribute-aware, on two newly released skin lesion datasets with different skin types: Fitzpatrick17k and Diverse Dermatology Images (DDI). We adapt two fairness-based metrics DPM and EOM for our multiple classes and sensitive attributes task, highlighting the skin-type bias in skin lesion classification. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of FairDisCo, with fairer and superior performance on skin lesion classification tasks.

本文介绍了一种基于深度学习的公平皮肤病诊断框架FairDisCo，通过对比学习和删除敏感属性等方法，有效解决了现有模型对较暗皮肤图像的低准确度问题。在两个新的皮肤数据集Fitzpatrick17k和Diverse Dermatology Images上的评估表明，FairDisCo在公平性和性能方面的表现均优于其他三种公平性方法。

FairDisCo: 利用去相关对比学习实现更公平的皮肤科人工智能