Evaluating Sex and Age Biases in Multimodal Large Language Models for Skin Disease Identification from Dermatoscopic Images.

ABSTRACT: Background: Multimodal large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in various health-related fields. However, many healthcare studies have raised concerns about the reliability and biases of LLMs in healthcare applications. Methods: To explore the practical application of multimodal LLMs in skin disease identification, and to evaluate sex and age biases, we tested the performance of 2 popular multimodal LLMs, ChatGPT-4 and LLaVA-1.6, across diverse sex and age groups using a subset of a large dermatoscopic dataset containing around 10,000 images and 3 skin diseases (melanoma, melanocytic nevi, and benign keratosis-like lesions). Results: In comparison to 3 deep learning models (VGG16, ResNet50, and Model Derm) based on convolutional neural network (CNN), one visi

SUBMITTER: Wan Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11961048 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature