Appearance-based Debiasing of Deep Learning Models in Medical Imaging

Out-of-distribution data can substantially impede the performance of deep learning models. In medical imaging, domain shifts can, for instance, be caused by different image acquisition protocols. To address these domain shifts, domain adversarial training can be employed to constrain a model to domainagnostic features. This, however, requires prior knowledge about the domain variable, which might not always be accessible. Recent approaches make use of control regions to guide the training process and thereby alleviate the need for prior domain knowledge. In this work, we combine these approaches with traditional domain adversarial training to exploit the benefits of both methods.We test the proposed method on two medical datasets and demonstrate performance increases of up to 10 %, compared to a baseline trained without debiasing.