arXiv Computer Vision

Quantifying privacy risks in foundation model representations of brain MRI

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 27

The pretraining domain outweighs the training objective in setting the privacy-utility trade-off of differentially private medical image analysis

arXiv:2601. 19618v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Differential privacy protects the patients whose images train medical imaging models, but it lowers diagnostic accuracy, and the initialization is the strongest known remedy.

By Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh, Mina Farajiamiri, Mahshad Lotfinia, Behrus Hinrichs-Puladi, Jonas Bienzeisler, Mohamed Alhaskir, Mirabela Rusu, Christiane Kuhl, Sven Nebelung, Daniel Truhn
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Private and interpretable clinical prediction with quantum-inspired tensor train models

The paper demonstrates that publicly available clinical machine learning models, such as logistic regression (LR), pose significant privacy risks because attackers can recover model parameters and identify training cohorts through various membership inference attacks. The authors show that even small cohorts can be reliably identified and that common practices like cross-validation can worsen the risk. To mitigate this, they propose a quantum-inspired defense that tensorizes discretized models into tensor trains (TTs), which obfuscates parameters, preserves accuracy, and maintains interpretability while providing black‑box protection comparable to Differential Privacy.

By Jos\'e Ram\'on Pareja Monturiol, Juliette Sinnott, Roger G. Melko, Mohammad Kohandel
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

Automated screening of privacy risks in medical AI

The paper introduces a lightweight screening tool that evaluates individual patient vulnerability to membership inference attacks across thousands of medical AI models. By measuring attack scores for each patient, the authors found that certain records consistently rank high in risk regardless of training settings, and that stronger weight decay can reduce overall exposure but not the identity of the most at‑risk patients. The tool uses four small models to flag high‑risk patients before a production model is trained, aiming to integrate privacy assessment into clinical AI data preparation.

By Konstantinos Vrettos, Eleftherios Tzanis, Haridimos Kondylakis, Evangelia E. Vassalou, Florence X. Doo, Michail E. Klontzas
arXiv AI
Jul 15

Understanding Sources of Demographic Predictability in Brain MRI via Disentangling Anatomy and Contrast

arXiv:2603. 04113v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Demographic attributes can be predicted from medical images, raising concerns about bias in clinical AI systems.

By Mehmet Yigit Avci (and for the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative), Akshit Achara (and for the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative), Andrew King (and for the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative), Jorge Cardoso (and for the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative)
arXiv AI
Sep 16

Differential privacy representation geometry for medical image analysis

The paper introduces Differential Privacy Representation Geometry for Medical Imaging (DP‑RGMI), a framework that interprets differential privacy as a structured transformation of representation space. DP‑RGMI decomposes performance loss into encoder geometry—measured by representation displacement and spectral effective dimension—and task‑head utilization, quantified by the gap between linear‑probe and end‑to‑end utility. Across 594,000 chest X‑ray images from four datasets, the study finds that differential privacy consistently creates a utilization gap even when linear separability remains, while displacement and spectral dimension vary non‑monotonically with initialization and dataset, indicating that privacy alters representation anisotropy rather than uniformly collapsing features.

By Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh, Marziyeh Mohammadi, Sven Nebelung, Daniel Truhn
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Picture the Epsilon: Pursuing Identity-Level Privacy Guarantees for Images

The paper compares four audit methods for assessing identity‑level differential privacy in pre‑trained, black‑box face generators. Each method—GaussMech, KDE‑LR, MMD‑TV, and ROC‑HT—has distinct assumptions, hyperparameters, and finite‑sample limitations, and they produce markedly different epsilon estimates when applied to FaceFusion and InstantID. The study finds that all methods reveal significant identity distinguishability, but none can be reliably ranked in this high‑distinguishability regime, suggesting that future work should evaluate them on partially private mechanisms.

By Arman Zareian Jahromi, Vishnu Bondalakunta, Mohammad Akbar Bin Shah, Naimul Haque, Shuangqing Wei, George T. Amariucai
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

Auditing Patient Privacy in Medical Generative Models: Scalable Memorization Detection with DeepSSIM++

DeepSSIM++ is a self‑supervised similarity metric designed to audit memorization in medical generative models at scale. It aggregates multi‑scale features and uses anatomy‑preserving augmentations to create an embedding space where cosine similarity approximates SSIM, removing the need for exact pixel‑level registration. Compared to existing baselines, DeepSSIM++ improves Macro F1 by 33–46 percentage points and speeds up large‑scale similarity computation by several orders of magnitude.

By Antonio Scardace, Francesco Guarnera, Sebastiano Battiato, Daniele Rav\`i