On the relationship between research parasites and fairness in machine learning: challenges and opportunities.

Machine learning systems influence our daily lives in many different ways. Hence, it is crucial to ensure that the decisions and recommendations made by these systems are fair, equitable, and free of unintended biases. Over the past few years, the field of fairness in machine learning has grown rapidly, investigating how, when, and why these models capture, and even potentiate, biases that are deeply rooted not only in the training data but also in our society. In this Commentary, we discuss challenges and opportunities for rigorous posterior analyses of publicly available data to build fair and equitable machine learning systems, focusing on the importance of training data, model construction, and diversity in the team of developers. The thoughts presented here have grown out of the work we did, which resulted in our winning the annual Research Parasite Award that GigaSciencesponsors.

Post-DAE: Anatomically Plausible Segmentation via Post-Processing With Denoising Autoencoders.

We introduce Post-DAE, a post-processing method based on denoising autoencoders (DAE) to improve the anatomical plausibility of arbitrary biomedical image segmentation algorithms. Some of the most popular segmentation methods (e.g. based on convolutional neural networks or random forest classifiers) incorporate additional post-processing steps to ensure that the resulting masks fulfill expected connectivity constraints. These methods operate under the hypothesis that contiguous pixels with similar aspect should belong to the same class. Even if valid in general, this assumption does not consider more complex priors like topological restrictions or convexity, which cannot be easily incorporated into these methods. Post-DAE leverages the latest developments in manifold learning via denoising autoencoders. First, we learn a compact and non-linear embedding that represents the space of anatomically plausible segmentations. Then, given a segmentation mask obtained with an arbitrary method, we reconstruct its anatomically plausible version by projecting it onto the learnt manifold. The proposed method is trained using unpaired segmentation mask, what makes it independent of intensity information and image modality. We performed experiments in binary and multi-label segmentation of chest X-ray and cardiac magnetic resonance images. We show how erroneous and noisy segmentation masks can be improved using Post-DAE. With almost no additional computation cost, our method brings erroneous segmentations back to a feasible space.

Gender imbalance in medical imaging datasets produces biased classifiers for computer-aided diagnosis.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems for computer-aided diagnosis and image-based screening are being adopted worldwide by medical institutions. In such a context, generating fair and unbiased classifiers becomes of paramount importance. The research community of medical image computing is making great efforts in developing more accurate algorithms to assist medical doctors in the difficult task of disease diagnosis. However, little attention is paid to the way databases are collected and how this may influence the performance of AI systems. Our study sheds light on the importance of gender balance in medical imaging datasets used to train AI systems for computer-assisted diagnosis. We provide empirical evidence supported by a large-scale study, based on three deep neural network architectures and two well-known publicly available X-ray image datasets used to diagnose various thoracic diseases under different gender imbalance conditions. We found a consistent decrease in performance for underrepresented genders when a minimum balance is not fulfilled. This raises the alarm for national agencies in charge of regulating and approving computer-assisted diagnosis systems, which should include explicit gender balance and diversity recommendations. We also establish an open problem for the academic medical image computing community which needs to be addressed by novel algorithms endowed with robustness to gender imbalance.