拆解脑部MRI的结构与扫描差异,发现年龄性别预测主要靠解剖结构。
Understanding Sources of Demographic Predictability in Brain MRI via Disentangling Anatomy and Contrast
- 用解耦表示学习分离脑影像的解剖结构与扫描特征。
- 解剖结构贡献了大部分年龄、性别预测信号,扫描差异影响较小。
- 适合关注医疗AI偏见机制与跨域泛化的研究者阅读。
从医学影像中可预测人口统计学特征,引发临床AI系统偏见的担忧。在X光影像中,采集特性已被证明是预测能力的重要来源。但在脑部MRI中,解剖变异与扫描依赖的对比度深度交织,难以区分人口统计信号的根源。为此,我们提出一种基于解耦表示学习的控制框架,将脑部MRI分解为抑制扫描影响的解剖结构表示和捕捉采集依赖特性的对比度嵌入。在三个数据集和多种MRI序列上,对全图、解剖表示和对比度嵌入训练年龄、性别和种族预测模型,量化结构与采集对人口统计信号的相对贡献。结果显示,解剖变异是主导因素,解剖表示几乎保持了原始图像模型的预测性能;对比度嵌入仅保留较弱的、数据集特定且无法跨站点泛化的信号。这表明,有效的偏见缓解需明确考虑以解剖结构为主、扫描差异为次的信号来源,确保跨领域泛化性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Demographic attributes can be predicted from medical images, raising concerns about bias in clinical AI systems. In X-ray imaging, acquisition characteristics have been shown to contribute substantially to this predictability. Whether the same holds in brain MRI remains unclear, as anatomical variation and acquisition-dependent contrast are deeply entangled in the image formation process, obscuring the origins of demographic signal. To address this, we propose a controlled framework based on disentangled representation learning, decomposing brain MRI into anatomy-focused representations that suppress acquisition influence and contrast embeddings that capture acquisition-dependent characteristics. Training predictive models for age, sex, and race on full images, anatomical representations, and contrast embeddings allows us to quantify the relative contributions of structure and acquisition to the demographic signal. Across three datasets and multiple MRI sequences, demographic predictability is found to be driven primarily by anatomical variation, with anatomy-focused representations largely preserving the performance of models trained on raw images. Contrast embeddings retain a weaker signal that is dataset-specific and does not generalize across sites. These findings suggest that effective mitigation must explicitly account for the primarily anatomical and secondarily acquisition-dependent origins of demographic signal, ensuring that any bias reduction generalizes robustly across domains.
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