SkinGEN: An explainable dermatology diagnosis-to-generation framework with interactive vision-language models

Abstract

With the continuous advancement of vision language models (VLMs) technology, remarkable research achievements have emerged in the dermatology field, the fourth most prevalent human disease category. However, despite these advancements, VLM still faces “hallucination” in dermatological diagnosis, and due to the inherent complexity of dermatological conditions, existing tools offer relatively limited support for user comprehension. We propose SkinGEN, a diagnosis-to-generation framework that leverages the stable diffusion (SD) method to generate reference demonstrations from diagnosis results provided by VLM, thereby enhancing the visual explainability for users. Through extensive experiments with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), we identify optimal strategies for skin condition image generation. We conduct a user study with 32 participants evaluating both the system performance and explainability. Results demonstrate that SkinGEN significantly improves users’ comprehension of VLM predictions and fosters increased trust in the diagnostic process. This work paves the way for more transparent and user-centric VLM applications in dermatology and beyond.

Publication
The ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces 2025
林博
林博
浙江大学滨江研究院研究员、健康信息创新实验室(HiLAB)常务副主任
徐荥璟
徐荥璟
2022级硕士生