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Uncertainty Estimates as Data Selection Criteria to Boost Omni-Supervised Learning

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Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2020 (MICCAI 2020)

Abstract

For many medical applications, large quantities of imaging data are routinely obtained but it can be difficult and time-consuming to obtain high-quality labels for that data. We propose a novel uncertainty-based method to improve the performance of segmentation networks when limited manual labels are available in a large dataset. We estimate segmentation uncertainty on unlabeled data using test-time augmentation and test-time dropout. We then use uncertainty metrics to select unlabeled samples for further training in a semi-supervised learning framework. Compared to random data selection, our method gives a significant boost in Dice coefficient for semi-supervised volume segmentation on the EADC-ADNI/HARP MRI dataset and the large-scale INTERGROWTH-21st ultrasound dataset. Our results show a greater performance boost on the ultrasound dataset, suggesting that our method is most useful with data of lower or more variable quality.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As most voxels distant from anatomical boundaries are consistently segmented, the uncertainty (or segmentation variance) of most voxels is 0.

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Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Nicola Dinsdale for her help with data preparation and analysis of the MRI dataset. This work is supported by funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Medical Research Council (MRC) [grant number EP/L016052/1]. A. T. Papageorghiou is supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre. A. Namburete is grateful for support from the UK Royal Academy of Engineering under the Engineering for Development Research Fellowships scheme. J. A. Noble acknowledges the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) (U01 AA014809-14), We thank the INTERGROWTH-21st Consortium for permission to use 3D ultrasound volumes of the fetal brain.

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Correspondence to Lorenzo Venturini .

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Venturini, L., Papageorghiou, A.T., Noble, J.A., Namburete, A.I.L. (2020). Uncertainty Estimates as Data Selection Criteria to Boost Omni-Supervised Learning. In: Martel, A.L., et al. Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2020. MICCAI 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12261. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59710-8_67

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59710-8_67

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