The use of deep learning for medical imaging has seen tremendous growth in the research community. One reason for the slow uptake of these systems in the clinical setting is that they are complex, opaque and tend to fail silently. Outside of the medical imaging domain, the machine learning community has recently proposed several techniques for quantifying model uncertainty (i.e.~a model knowing when it has failed). This is important in practical settings, as we can refer such cases to manual inspection or correction by humans. In this paper, we aim to bring these recent results on estimating uncertainty to bear on two important outputs in deep learning-based segmentation. The first is producing spatial uncertainty maps, from which a clinician can observe where and why a system thinks it is failing. The second is quantifying an image-level prediction of failure, which is useful for isolating specific cases and removing them from automated pipelines. We also show that reasoning about spatial uncertainty, the first output, is a useful intermediate representation for generating segmentation quality predictions, the second output. We propose a two-stage architecture for producing these measures of uncertainty, which can accommodate any deep learning-based medical segmentation pipeline.

本文旨在将最近关于评估不确定性的结果应用于基于深度学习的医学分割中的两个重要输出：产生空间不确定性映射，以便临床医生可以观察系统何时以及为何错误，以及量化图像级别的失败预测，并展示关于空间不确定性的推理是产生分割质量预测的有用中间表示。提出了一个两阶段的架构来生成这些不确定性测量，可以适应任何基于深度学习的医学分割管道。

利用不确定性评估预测分割质量