Interpretability of AI race detection model in medical imaging with saliency methods
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are powerful tools for classifying images. Using these convolutional models for medical images is challenging due to their complexity and large number of parameters, making it hard to find clinically meaningful explanations for their decisions. To overcome the opaqueness inherent to such models, saliency techniques suggest generating maps that highlight the regions of an image important for the DNN's prediction. DNN models have shown the capability of race detection from medical images of different modalities, which is concerning as they under-diagnose patients from historically under-served races. The objective of this paper is to use explainability methods to detect subtle bias that DNNs use to detect a patient's race from chest X-rays. Toward this end, we apply eight state-of-the-art methods and propose to evaluate their effectiveness. We demonstrate that the salient region's size is crucial to understanding network behavior. When the salient region covers 30% of the image, we find that only the Rise method is effective at locating salient areas, as it can both accurately predict a patient's race on chest X-ray images on its own and mislead the network on race detection when removed. We, therefore, note that saliency maps in the medical field should be used with caution, as there is no available ground truth, and the network may occasionally employ low-level image features to compute predictions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".