Paper ID: 2403.18196

Looking Beyond What You See: An Empirical Analysis on Subgroup Intersectional Fairness for Multi-label Chest X-ray Classification Using Social Determinants of Racial Health Inequities

Dana Moukheiber, Saurabh Mahindre, Lama Moukheiber, Mira Moukheiber, Mingchen Gao

There has been significant progress in implementing deep learning models in disease diagnosis using chest X- rays. Despite these advancements, inherent biases in these models can lead to disparities in prediction accuracy across protected groups. In this study, we propose a framework to achieve accurate diagnostic outcomes and ensure fairness across intersectional groups in high-dimensional chest X- ray multi-label classification. Transcending traditional protected attributes, we consider complex interactions within social determinants, enabling a more granular benchmark and evaluation of fairness. We present a simple and robust method that involves retraining the last classification layer of pre-trained models using a balanced dataset across groups. Additionally, we account for fairness constraints and integrate class-balanced fine-tuning for multi-label settings. The evaluation of our method on the MIMIC-CXR dataset demonstrates that our framework achieves an optimal tradeoff between accuracy and fairness compared to baseline methods.

Submitted: Mar 27, 2024