A Global Atlas of Digital Dermatology to Map Innovation and Disparities
Fabian Gr\"oger, Simone Lionetti, Philippe Gottfrois, Alvaro Gonzalez-Jimenez, Lea Habermacher, Labelling Consortium, Ludovic Amruthalingam, Matthew Groh, Marc Pouly, Alexander A. Navarini

TL;DR
This paper introduces SkinMap, a comprehensive semantic atlas of dermatology images that quantifies dataset diversity, redundancy, and gaps, revealing underrepresented groups and guiding future data collection efforts.
Contribution
It presents the first unified framework to audit dermatology datasets, measuring informational novelty, redundancy, and demographic coverage to identify gaps and inform strategic data acquisition.
Findings
Exponential dataset growth with plateauing informational novelty.
Underrepresentation of darker skin tones and rare diseases.
Identification of key demographic and disease coverage gaps.
Abstract
The adoption of artificial intelligence in dermatology promises democratized access to healthcare, but model reliability depends on the quality and comprehensiveness of the data fueling these models. Despite rapid growth in publicly available dermatology images, the field lacks quantitative key performance indicators to measure whether new datasets expand clinical coverage or merely replicate what is already known. Here we present SkinMap, a multi-modal framework for the first comprehensive audit of the field's entire data basis. We unify the publicly available dermatology datasets into a single, queryable semantic atlas comprising more than 1.1 million images of skin conditions and quantify (i) informational novelty over time, (ii) dataset redundancy, and (iii) representation gaps across demographics and diagnoses. Despite exponential growth in dataset sizes, informational novelty…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsCutaneous Melanoma Detection and Management · Dermatological and COVID-19 studies · Dermatology and Skin Diseases
