研究肤色对皮肤病变分割的影响,发现低对比度是分割失败主因。
Exploring the Impact of Skin Color on Skin Lesion Segmentation
- 用连续色素分布分析替代离散肤色分类,更精准评估分割性能。
- 低病变-皮肤对比度与分割误差显著相关,而肤色类型关联弱。
- 适合关注AI皮肤病诊断公平性与模型鲁棒性的研究者阅读。
皮肤癌(尤其是黑色素瘤)仍是导致发病率和死亡率的主要原因,早期检测至关重要。当前基于AI的皮肤科系统通常依赖病变分割作为预处理步骤,以区分病变与周围皮肤并支持后续分析。尽管肤色对病变分类的公平性已有广泛研究,但其对分割阶段的影响仍缺乏量化评估,且多采用粗糙的离散肤色类别。本文在两个公开的皮肤镜数据集(HAM10000 和 ISIC2017)上评估了三种强分割架构(UNet、DeepLabV3 + ResNet50、DINOv2),引入一种基于像素级ITA值分布的连续色素/对比度分析方法。通过计算图像内仅皮肤、仅病变及全图区域间的Wasserstein距离,量化病变-皮肤对比度,并关联到多种分割指标的表现。结果表明,在数据集覆盖范围内,全局肤色度量(如Fitzpatrick分型或平均ITA)与分割质量关联较弱;相反,低病变-皮肤对比度始终与更大的分割误差相关,说明边界模糊与低对比度是模型失败的关键驱动因素。研究建议,提升皮肤镜分割公平性应优先关注对低对比度病变的鲁棒处理,且分布式色素度量比离散肤色类别更具信息量。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Skin cancer, particularly melanoma, remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality, making early detection critical. AI-driven dermatology systems often rely on skin lesion segmentation as a preprocessing step to delineate the lesion from surrounding skin and support downstream analysis. While fairness concerns regarding skin tone have been widely studied for lesion classification, the influence of skin tone on the segmentation stage remains under-quantified and is frequently assessed using coarse, discrete skin tone categories. In this work, we evaluate three strong segmentation architectures (UNet, DeepLabV3 with a ResNet50 backbone, and DINOv2) on two public dermoscopic datasets (HAM10000 and ISIC2017) and introduce a continuous pigment or contrast analysis that treats pixel-wise ITA values as distributions. Using Wasserstein distances between within-image distributions for skin-only, lesion-only, and whole-image regions, we quantify lesion skin contrast and relate it to segmentation performance across multiple metrics. Within the range represented in these datasets, global skin tone metrics (Fitzpatrick grouping or mean ITA) show weak association with segmentation quality. In contrast, low lesion-skin contrast is consistently associated with larger segmentation errors in models, indicating that boundary ambiguity and low contrast are key drivers of failure. These findings suggest that fairness improvements in dermoscopic segmentation should prioritize robust handling of low-contrast lesions, and the distribution-based pigment measures provide a more informative audit signal than discrete skin-tone categories.
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