# Unsupervised Search for Ethnic Minorities' Medical Segmentation Training Set

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02442 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02442/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07593/) (2018)
- [MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07042/) (2019)
- [Customized Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13785/) (2023)
- [Multiaccuracy: Black-Box Post-Processing for Fairness in Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12317/) (2018)
- [Evaluating Deep Neural Networks Trained on Clinical Images in Dermatology with the Fitzpatrick 17k Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09957/) (2021)
- [Reading Race: AI Recognises Patient's Racial Identity In Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10356/) (2021)
- [Fair Attribute Classification through Latent Space De-biasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01469/) (2020)
- [Fairness by Learning Orthogonal Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05707/) (2020)
- [Bias Mitigation Post-processing for Individual and Group Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06135/) (2018)
- [Fair Contrastive Learning for Facial Attribute Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16209/) (2022)
- [Fairness-aware Adversarial Perturbation Towards Bias Mitigation for Deployed Deep Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01584/) (2022)
- [Towards Accuracy-Fairness Paradox: Adversarial Example-based Data Augmentation for Visual Debiasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13632/) (2020)
- [Positive-Unlabeled Compression on the Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09757/) (2019)
- [Neural Data Server: A Large-Scale Search Engine for Transfer Learning Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02799/) (2020)
- [Large-scale Training Data Search for Object Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16186/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Intelligent logistics management robot path planning algorithm integrating transformer and GCN network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02749/) (2025)
- [MamNet: A Novel Hybrid Model for Time-Series Forecasting and Frequency Pattern Analysis in Network Traffic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00304/) (2025)
- [Research on Short-Video Platform User Decision-Making via Multimodal Temporal Modeling and Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12269/) (2025)
- [DT-NeRF: A Diffusion and Transformer-Based Optimization Approach for Neural Radiance Fields in 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17232/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This article investigates the critical issue of dataset bias in medical imaging, with a particular emphasis on racial disparities caused by uneven population distribution in dataset collection. Our analysis reveals that medical segmentation datasets are significantly biased, primarily influenced by the demographic composition of their collection sites. For instance, Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscopy (SLO) fundus datasets collected in the United States predominantly feature images of White individuals, with minority racial groups underrepresented. This imbalance can result in biased model performance and inequitable clinical outcomes, particularly for minority populations. To address this challenge, we propose a novel training set search strategy aimed at reducing these biases by focusing on underrepresented racial groups. Our approach utilizes existing datasets and employs a simple greedy algorithm to identify source images that closely match the target domain distribution. By selecting training data that aligns more closely with the characteristics of minority populations, our strategy improves the accuracy of medical segmentation models on specific minorities, i.e., Black. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in mitigating bias. We also discuss the broader societal implications, highlighting how addressing these disparities can contribute to more equitable healthcare outcomes.