ReviewNPJ digital medicine2024
A survey of skin tone assessment in prospective research.
Review in NPJ digital medicine, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Placebo Response in Randomised Controlled Trials of Systemic Therapies for Cutaneous Lupus Erythematosus: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Pharmaceutical medicine · 2026Pooled it
- Unifying the spectrum: a framework for the meta-analysis of human skin tone scales.Journal of biomedical optics · 2026Pooled it
- Burn Extent and Fitzpatrick Skin Tone Assessment from Clinical Photographs: Systematic and Random Error in Multimodal Large Language Models.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Effect of Fitzpatrick Skin Type Prompting on Diagnostic Accuracy in Multimodal Large Language Models: A Within-Image Experimental Study.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Seeing Skin Tone Differently: An Experimental Comparison of Objective Measurements and Subjective Perceptions.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Observational
- Assessment of Temperature Monitoring Techniques in Neonatal and Juvenile BALB/cJ and C57BL/6J Mice (Mus musculus) as They Age.Journal of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science : JAALAS · 2026Article
- Translational Evaluation of a Disodium Adenosine Monophosphate (AMP2Na)-Based Topical Formulation for Physiology-Aligned Skin Rejuvenation: Integrated In Vitro, Ex Vivo, and Clinical Evidence.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Article
- A multitask Transformer-VAE framework for robust PPG denoising and atrial fibrillation screening.BMC medical imaging · 2026Article
- Photochemical synergy in hybrid sunscreen gels: enhanced UV protection and photostability with algal antioxidants, quercetin, azobenzene, and chitosan-coated TiO₂ nanoparticles.Photochemical & photobiological sciences : Official journal of the European Photochemistry Association and the European Society for Photobiology · 2026Article
- Digital instrument simulator platform to support the development of noninvasive optical NIR device for placenta monitoring.Journal of biomedical optics · 2026Article
- Skin tone and clinical dataset from a prospective trial on acute care patients.Scientific data · 2026Article
- The impact of skin tone on performance of pulse oximeters used by NHS England COVID Oximetry @home scheme: measurement and diagnostic accuracy study.BMJ (Clinical research ed.) · 2026Observational
- Artificial intelligence in three-dimensional total-body photography for skin cancer surveillance.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Review
- Bridging Accessibility and Precision: Evaluating the Reliability and Validity of a Smartphone-Based Skin Colorimeter.Clinical, cosmetic and investigational dermatology · 2026Article
- Evaluating skin tone scales for dermatologic dataset labeling: a prospective-comparative study.NPJ digital medicine · 2025Article
- Multispectral optoelectronic sensor to detect peripheral blood pulsatile variations with equivalent performance in light, medium and dark skin tones.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Scar Quality After Burns in Relation to Skin Type, Classified by Device-Based Colour Measurement, as an Alternative for the Fitzpatrick Questionnaire.International wound journal · 2025Article
- Validity of two subjective skin tone scales and its implications on healthcare model fairness.NPJ digital medicine · 2025Article
- Machine reading and recovery of colors for hemoglobin-related bioassays and bioimaging.Science advances · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Increasing evidence supports reduced accuracy of noninvasive assessment tools, such as pulse oximetry, temperature probes, and AI skin diagnosis benchmarks, in patients with darker skin tones. The FDA is exploring potential strategies for device regulation to improve performance across diverse skin tones by including skin tone criteria. However, there is no consensus about how prospective studies should perform skin tone assessment in order to take this bias into account. There are several tools available to conduct skin tone assessments including administered visual scales (e.g., Fitzpatrick Skin Type, Pantone, Monk Skin Tone) and color measurement tools (e.g., reflectance colorimeters, reflectance spectrophotometers, cameras), although none are consistently used or validated across multiple medical domains. Accurate and consistent skin tone measurement depends on many factors including standardized environments, lighting, body parts assessed, patient conditions, and choice of skin tone assessment tool(s). As race and ethnicity are inadequate proxies for skin tone, these considerations can be helpful in standardizing the effect of skin tone on studies such as AI dermatology diagnoses, pulse oximetry, and temporal thermometers. Skin tone bias in medical devices is likely due to systemic factors that lead to inadequate validation across diverse skin tones. There is an opportunity for researchers to use skin tone assessment methods with standardized considerations in prospective studies of noninvasive tools that may be affected by skin tone. We propose considerations that researchers must take in order to improve device robustness to skin tone bias.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.