# Achieving Reliable and Fair Skin Lesion Diagnosis via Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03157 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03157/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02530/) (2019)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection: A Challenge at the 2017 International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05006/) (2017)
- [Evaluating Deep Neural Networks Trained on Clinical Images in Dermatology with the Fitzpatrick 17k Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09957/) (2021)
- [A Patient-Centric Dataset of Images and Metadata for Identifying Melanomas Using Clinical Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07360/) (2020)
- [Disparities in Dermatology AI: Assessments Using Diverse Clinical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08006/) (2021)
- [Fairness in Deep Learning: A Computational Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08843/) (2019)
- [A deep learning system for differential diagnosis of skin diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05382/) (2019)
- [PAD-UFES-20: a skin lesion dataset composed of patient data and clinical images collected from smartphones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00478/) (2020)
- [OTCE: A Transferability Metric for Cross-Domain Cross-Task Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13843/) (2021)
- [DermGAN: Synthetic Generation of Clinical Skin Images with Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08716/) (2019)
- [GAN-Based Data Augmentation and Anonymization for Skin-Lesion Analysis: A Critical Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10603/) (2021)
- [Understanding the Transferability of Representations via Task-Relatedness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00823/) (2023)
- [Domain shifts in dermoscopic skin cancer datasets: Evaluation of essential limitations for clinical translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06968/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Describe Anything in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05804/) (2025)
- [From Majority to Minority: A Diffusion-based Augmentation for Underrepresented Groups in Skin Lesion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18375/) (2024)
- [Doctor Approved: Generating Medically Accurate Skin Disease Images through AI-Expert Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12323/) (2025)
- [Investigating the Quality of DermaMNIST and Fitzpatrick17k Dermatological Image Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14497/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Skin Disease Diagnosis: Interpretable Visual Concept Discovery with SAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09520/) (2024)
- [Adapting in the Dark: Efficient and Stable Test-Time Adaptation for Black-Box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15609/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Skin Lesion Classification Generalization with Active Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00702/) (2024)
- [CoFiDA-M: Concept-Aware Feature Modulation for Cross-Domain Adaptation with Image-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31591/) (2026)
- [How Medical VLMs Underutilize Their Vision Encoders: A Dermatology Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36557/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The development of reliable and fair diagnostic systems is often constrained by the scarcity of labeled data. To address this challenge, our work explores the feasibility of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) to integrate large external datasets for developing reliable classifiers. The adoption of UDA with multiple sources can simultaneously enrich the training set and bridge the domain gap between different skin lesion datasets, which vary due to distinct acquisition protocols. Particularly, UDA shows practical promise for improving diagnostic reliability when training with a custom skin lesion dataset, where only limited labeled data are available from the target domain. In this study, we investigate three UDA training schemes based on source data utilization: single-source, combined-source, and multi-source UDA. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of applying UDA on multiple sources for binary and multi-class classification. A strong correlation between test error and label shift in multi-class tasks has been observed in the experiment. Crucially, our study shows that UDA can effectively mitigate bias against minority groups and enhance fairness in diagnostic systems, while maintaining superior classification performance. This is achieved even without directly implementing fairness-focused techniques. This success is potentially attributed to the increased and well-adapted demographic information obtained from multiple sources.