Title
On the Effect of Inter-observer Variability for a Reliable Estimation of Uncertainty of Medical Image Segmentation.
Abstract
Uncertainty estimation methods are expected to improve the understanding and quality of computer-assisted methods used in medical applications (e.g., neurosurgical interventions, radiotherapy planning), where automated medical image segmentation is crucial. In supervised machine learning, a common practice to generate ground truth label data is to merge observer annotations. However, as many medical image tasks show a high inter-observer variability resulting from factors such as image quality, different levels of user expertise and domain knowledge, little is known as to how inter-observer variability and commonly used fusion methods affect the estimation of uncertainty of automated image segmentation. In this paper we analyze the effect of common image label fusion techniques on uncertainty estimation, and propose to learn the uncertainty among observers. The results highlight the negative effect of fusion methods applied in deep learning, to obtain reliable estimates of segmentation uncertainty. Additionally, we show that the learned observers' uncertainty can be combined with current standard Monte Carlo dropout Bayesian neural networks to characterize uncertainty of model's parameters.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1007/978-3-030-00928-1_77
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Inter-observer variability,Uncertainty estimation,Semantic segmentation
Conference
11070
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0302-9743
2
0.36
References 
Authors
7
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alain Jungo151.75
Raphael Meier230714.51
Ekin Ermis320.36
Marcela Blatti-Moreno420.36
Evelyn Herrmann520.36
Roland Wiest634422.73
Mauricio Reyes77313.74