Deep learning (DL) networks have recently been shown to outperform other segmentation methods on various public, medical-image challenge datasets [3,11,16], especially for large pathologies. However, in the context of diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis (MS), monitoring all the focal lesions visible on MRI sequences, even very small ones, is essential for disease staging, prognosis, and evaluating treatment efficacy. Moreover, producing deterministic outputs hinders DL adoption into clinical routines. Uncertainty estimates for the predictions would permit subsequent revision by clinicians. We present the first exploration of multiple uncertainty estimates based on Monte Carlo (MC) dropout [4] in the context of deep networks for lesion detection and segmentation in medical images. Specifically, we develop a 3D MS lesion segmentation CNN, augmented to provide four different voxel-based uncertainty measures based on MC dropout. We train the network on a proprietary, large-scale, multi-site, multi-scanner, clinical MS dataset, and compute lesion-wise uncertainties by accumulating evidence from voxel-wise uncertainties within detected lesions. We analyze the performance of voxel-based segmentation and lesion-level detection by choosing operating points based on the uncertainty. Empirical evidence suggests that uncertainty measures consistently allow us to choose superior operating points compared only using the network's sigmoid output as a probability.

研究探索了在深度神经网络中基于蒙特卡罗Dropout的多种不确定性估计方法，提供了四种不同的体素级别的不确定性度量，可用于医学图像中的病变检测和分割。经实验结果表明，使用不确定性度量能够比仅使用网络的Sigmoid输出作为概率选择更好的操作点。

探索深度网络中的不确定性度量以用于多发性硬化症病变检测和分割