The study examines how three parameter‑efficient adaptation methods—linear heads on the raw CLS token, an MLP, and an attention‑pooling module—affect pathology classification accuracy and subgroup fairness when applied to a frozen Rad‑DINO chest X‑ray encoder. Using the MIMIC‑CXR dataset, the authors evaluate eight pathologies across race, sex, and imaging‑view subgroups, finding that attention pooling yields the best overall performance and encodes protected attributes most strongly, yet higher performance does not consistently reduce subgroup disparities. The results show that attribute encoding strength and layer choice do not reliably predict fairness outcomes, indicating that fairness must be assessed directly for each task.
arXiv:2603. 16551v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative models are increasingly used to augment medical imaging datasets for fairer AI, yet a key assumption often goes unexamined: that generators produce equally high-quality images across demographic groups.
arXiv:2601.15891v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-language pretraining has driven progress in medical image representation learning, but it depends on paired image-text data and can inherit...
Med-AR introduces two autoregressive vision‑language models, Med‑AR‑8B and Med‑AR‑2B, pretrained on structured radiology reports, abnormality‑focused text, and region annotations to address long‑tailed chest X‑ray classification. The models outperform existing contrastive, self‑supervised, and supervised encoders—including Med‑CLIP, CheXFound, EVA‑Base, ARK, and BioViL‑T—across PadChest, MIMIC‑CXR, and CheXpert, achieving higher mean AUROC and AUPRC for head, medium, and tail findings and lower excess area under the risk‑coverage curve. Med‑AR also demonstrates improved selective‑prediction performance, with Med‑AR‑8B raising tail‑label mean AUPRC on MIMIC‑CXR from 0.1033 to 0.1441 and Med‑AR‑2B delivering the strongest discrimination on PadChest.
The paper introduces FRAME, a two‑step framework for auditing fairness claims in medical imaging. First, it derives a fair‑model reference distribution that captures the portion of subgroup performance differences attributable to sampling variation. Second, it tests the remaining difference using operators in representation space to assess whether demographic information or disease entanglement drives the bias. Across a large dataset of 702,206 images and 36 encoders, the reference explains a substantial median share of race and age differences, while interventions such as injecting demographic decodability or entangling disease direction have limited impact on the residual bias.
arXiv:2607. 14984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Per-subgroup fairness audits of medical image classifiers face a sample-size problem: minority subgroups in held-out test sets have so few samples that the resulting confidence intervals on per-subgroup performance are wider than the bias the audit is meant to detect.
arXiv:2607. 04478v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated chest X-ray classification remains challenging due to severe class imbalance, co-occurring pathologies, and the loss of localized features in conventional architectures.
Subgroup performance differences are the standard evidence for fairness bias in medical imaging, and the usual response removes the demographic information that a model encodes. Here we introduce Fair...
arXiv:2509. 19671v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Public datasets of Chest X-Rays (CXRs) have long been a popular benchmark for developing machine learning (ML) computer vision models in healthcare.
Deep-learning models can achieve strong chest X-ray (CXR) classification performance without establishing whether their predictions predominantly rely on pulmonary image content. This study evaluates...
arXiv:2607. 25164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A CT examination captures multiple organs, but many biomedical questions concern abnormalities, prognosis, or longitudinal change in a specific organ.
arXiv:2608.00231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Volumetric CT vision-language pretraining learns 3D representations from scan-report pairs, but global and anatomy-aware objectives supervise only...
arXiv:2608. 12086v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models, such as contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP)-based approaches, have reached state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in medical artificial intelligence.