Improving Equity in Deep Learning Medical Applications with the Gerchberg-Saxton Algorithm

Deep learning (DL) has gained prominence in healthcare for its ability to facilitate early diagnosis, treatment identification with associated prognosis, and varying patient outcome predictions. However, because of highly variable medical practices and unsystematic data collection approaches, DL can unfortunately exacerbate biases and distort estimates. For example, the presence of sampling bias poses a significant challenge to the efficacy and generalizability of any statistical model. Even with DL approaches, selection bias can lead to inconsistent, suboptimal, or inaccurate model results, especially for underrepresented populations. Therefore, without addressing bias, wider implementation of DL approaches can potentially cause unintended harm. In this paper, we studied a novel method for bias reduction that leverages the frequency domain transformation via the Gerchberg-Saxton and corresponding impact on the outcome from a racio-ethnic bias perspective.