Perhaps there is some quality of the x rays themselves that is different? Maybe white people tend to visit hospitals with newer, better equipment or better trained radiographers and the model is picking up on differences in the exposures from that.
From the paper "Race prediction performance was also robust across models trained on single equipment and single hospital location on the chest x-ray and mammogram datasets"
They mostly accounted for this:
>Race prediction performance was also robust across models trained on single equipment and single hospital location on the chest x-ray and mammogram datasets
Sure, itβs possible that bias due to the radiographer is the culprit, but this seems unlikely.
