论文标题
通过标准化流量的医学图像分割中的不确定性定量
Uncertainty quantification in medical image segmentation with normalizing flows
论文作者
论文摘要
医疗图像分割本质上是一项模棱两可的任务,这是由于部分体积和解剖学定义的变化等因素。尽管在大多数情况下,分割不确定性是在感兴趣的结构范围内,但也可能存在很大的评价者差异。条件变异自动编码器(CVAE)类别提供了一种原则性的方法,可以推断出在输入图像条件下的合理分割的分布。从此类分布的样本中估算的分割不确定性比使用像素级概率得分更具信息性。在这项工作中,我们提出了一个基于条件归一化流(CFLOW)的新型条件生成模型。基本思想是通过在编码器之后引入CFLOW变换步骤来提高CVAE的表现性。这产生了潜在的后验分布的近似值,从而使模型可以捕获更丰富的分割变化。这样,我们表明从条件生成模型获得的样品的质量和多样性得到了增强。与最近基于CVAE的模型相比,在两个医学成像数据集上评估了模型的性能(我们称为CFlow NET),证明了定性和定量措施的实质性改进。
Medical image segmentation is inherently an ambiguous task due to factors such as partial volumes and variations in anatomical definitions. While in most cases the segmentation uncertainty is around the border of structures of interest, there can also be considerable inter-rater differences. The class of conditional variational autoencoders (cVAE) offers a principled approach to inferring distributions over plausible segmentations that are conditioned on input images. Segmentation uncertainty estimated from samples of such distributions can be more informative than using pixel level probability scores. In this work, we propose a novel conditional generative model that is based on conditional Normalizing Flow (cFlow). The basic idea is to increase the expressivity of the cVAE by introducing a cFlow transformation step after the encoder. This yields improved approximations of the latent posterior distribution, allowing the model to capture richer segmentation variations. With this we show that the quality and diversity of samples obtained from our conditional generative model is enhanced. Performance of our model, which we call cFlow Net, is evaluated on two medical imaging datasets demonstrating substantial improvements in both qualitative and quantitative measures when compared to a recent cVAE based model.