Accurate dermatological diagnosis naturally necessitates equitable performance across diverse populations, yet a systematic lack of expertly annotated images, especially for underrepresented skin tones and rare diseases, impedes progress toward measurably fair methods. We introduce cgDDI (Controllable Generation of Diverse Dermatological Imagery), a hybrid framework that (1) synthesizes realistic healthy skin samples without disturbing other input properties, (2) maps single-sample rare lesions onto novel skin-tones and locations non-parametrically, and (3) allows for efficient parametric generation with as few as 10 training samples.
arXiv:2609.36400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep learning classifiers for dermoscopic skin lesions often reach high in-distribution accuracy while quietly relying on spurious background cues su...
The study examines why dermatology AI models, largely trained on light‑skinned, cancer‑focused images, perform poorly when applied to diverse patient populations. By comparing a cancer‑trained baseline, two dermatology foundation models, and a general‑purpose vision model on tone‑stratified and disease‑shifted datasets, the authors find that disease‑distribution shift, rather than skin‑tone underrepresentation, is the primary cause of generalization failure. Representation analysis shows that cancer‑specialized features lack transferable structure, while dermatology‑pretrained features maintain stronger clustering, and lightweight adaptation with about ten labeled examples per category can recover most performance.
arXiv:2609.07180v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC) is the most common type of skin cancer, accounting for nearly 80% of skin cancer di- agnoses. Its optimal clinical managem...
The paper introduces MIFR, a modality‑invariant and fair representation framework for skin disease classification that jointly processes clinical photographs and dermoscopic images using ViT‑based encoders. It employs a five‑component multi‑objective loss to balance classification accuracy, fairness across skin tones, class alignment, and modality invariance. Experiments on paired and external datasets demonstrate competitive predictive performance and fairness, with t‑SNE visualizations confirming alignment of embeddings from different modalities.
Skin diseases represent a major global public health burden, yet machine learning tools developed to assist in their diagnosis suffer from two critical limitations: reliance on only one modality for d...
InstEditSeg is a generative framework that treats medical segmentation as an instruction-driven image editing task. Instead of producing binary masks, it renders a color-coded overlay on the original image guided by textual instructions, leveraging latent diffusion models to align with natural image distributions and reduce domain gaps. The method incorporates a DINOv3 visual encoder and a multi-scale feature pyramid fused into the diffusion U‑Net, and uses a dual‑branch classifier‑free guidance strategy to lower inference cost, achieving competitive accuracy on polyp and skin lesion datasets while improving cross‑domain generalization and multi‑lesion segmentation.
The study compares five pre‑trained convolutional neural networks—ResNet50, VGG16, VGG19, MobileNet, and InceptionV3—for melanoma detection using dermatoscopic and histopathological image datasets. Accuracy varied across models and modalities, with ResNet50 achieving the highest scores (84% on HAM10000 and 83% on CR‑AI4SkIN) and InceptionV3 the lowest (71% on ISIC 2018). The results show that a model’s performance on dermatoscopic images does not necessarily predict its performance on histopathological images.
Benchmarking competitions are central to AI development in medical imaging, but it is unclear if they provide representative, accessible, and reusable data for clinical relevance. This study systematically examined 249 challenges (458 tasks) across 19 imaging modalities, finding limited geographic, modality, and problem-type representation. Additionally, many datasets suffer from restrictive access, ambiguous licensing, and poor documentation, hindering reproducibility and long-term reuse.
arXiv:2601. 08127v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Expert-annotated training data remains the critical bottleneck for AI in histopathology, particularly for rare pathologies where even dozens of cases may be unavailable.
arXiv:2609.38560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mycosis fungoides (MF) is a rare form of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma that is often misdiagnosed in early stages due to its visual similarity to benign in...
arXiv:2606. 04971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning engineering (MLE) agents promise to automate end-to-end ML pipeline development from raw data and natural language instructions, potentially making ML accessible to non-technical domain experts.
The paper introduces Colorist, a data‑augmentation method that uses classical statistical color matching to generate domain‑shifted medical images. By applying global mean‑standard‑deviation matching in RGB space, Colorist creates structurally intact variations without neural networks, outperforming deep generative models in fidelity and color alignment. Across multiple medical imaging datasets, it boosts balanced accuracy by up to 9% over state‑of‑the‑art domain‑generalization regularizers and 13% over no augmentation, while reducing computational cost and preserving anatomical structure.