The DOI matches its Crossref record; 56 of the 56 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Confidence Calibration and Predictive Uncertainty Estimation for Deep Medical Image Segmentation
Open accessAbstract
Fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs), and in particular U-Nets, have achieved state-of-the-art results in semantic segmentation for numerous medical imaging applications. Moreover, batch normalization and Dice loss have been used successfully to stabilize and accelerate training. However, these networks are poorly calibrated i.e. they tend to produce overconfident predictions for both correct and erroneous classifications, making them unreliable and hard to interpret. In this paper, we study predictive uncertainty estimation in FCNs for medical image segmentation. We make the following contributions: 1) We systematically compare cross-entropy loss with Dice loss in terms of segmentation quality and uncertainty estimation of FCNs; 2) We propose model ensembling for confidence calibration of the FCNs trained with batch normalization and Dice loss; 3) We assess the ability of calibrated FCNs to predict segmentation quality of structures and detect out-of-distribution test examples. We conduct extensive experiments across three medical image segmentation applications of the brain, the heart, and the prostate to evaluate our contributions. The results of this study offer considerable insight into the predictive uncertainty estimation and out-of-distribution detection in medical image segmentation and provide practical recipes for confidence calibration. Moreover, we consistently demonstrate that model ensembling improves confidence calibration.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The source backs part of the claim, not all of it — or backs it for a different population, condition or comparison.
In the citing paper
“Natekar al. [694] | et | 2020 | DenseUnet, ResUnet, SimUnet | Segmentation | Brain tumor | 1 | TTD (test time dropout) for VI”
From A review of uncertainty quantification in deep learning: Techniques, applications and challenges (2021) · cites this paper as [694]
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredThe source backs part of the claim, not all of it — or backs it for a different population, condition or comparison.
In the citing paper
“Increasingly, disagreement among these CV models is reused as a proxy for epistemic uncertainty in downstream applications such as quality control and human-in-the-loop review [11,18,15].”
From Lost in the Folds: When Cross-Validation Is Not a Deep Ensemble for Uncertainty Estimation (2026) · cites this paper as [18]
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation
Ronneberger, O., Fischer, P., & Brox, T. (2015) · Lecture notes in computer science · doi:10.1007/978-3-319-24574-4_28 · Cited by 99,404
Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization
Kingma, D. P., & Ba, J. (2014) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1412.6980 · Cited by 98,946
Fully convolutional networks for semantic segmentation
Long, J., Shelhamer, E., & Darrell, T. (2015) · 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) · doi:10.1109/cvpr.2015.7298965 · Cited by 38,834
(2014) · Cited by 33,419
Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift
Ioffe, S., & Szegedy, C. (2015) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1502.03167 · Cited by 27,818
Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification
He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., & Sun, J. (2015) · 2015 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) · doi:10.1109/iccv.2015.123 · Cited by 19,741
A survey on deep learning in medical image analysis
Litjens, G., Kooi, T., Bejnordi, B. E., Setio, A. A. A., Ciompi, F., Ghafoorian, M., van der Laak, J. A. W. M., van Ginneken, B., & Sánchez, C. I. (2017) · Medical Image Analysis · doi:10.1016/j.media.2017.07.005 · Cited by 15,332
V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation
Milletari, F., Navab, N., & Ahmadi, S.-A. (2016) · 2016 Fourth International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) · doi:10.1109/3dv.2016.79 · Cited by 11,931
Fully convolutional networks for semantic segmentation
Shelhamer, E., Long, J., & Darrell, T. (2017) · IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1109/tpami.2016.2572683 · Cited by 11,898
Ensemble methods in machine learning
Dietterich, T. G. (2000) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/3-540-45014-9_1 · Cited by 8,408
Research works printed but not linked: 10
- 2018, Tgs Salt Identification Challenge
- 2018, Grand Challenge on MR Brain Segmentation at MICCAI 2018
- 10.5555/3045118.3045167 · DOI
- 10.21236/ADA459827 · DOI
- 10.5555/3045390.3045502 · DOI
- Liao, 2019, On modelling label uncertainty in deep neural networks: Automatic estimation of intra-observer variability in 2D echocardiography quality assessment, arXiv:1911.00674 · arXiv
- 10.1109/CVPR.2018.00464 · DOI
- 10.1201/9781420002690 · DOI
- 10.5555/3295222.3295309 · DOI
- 10.1007/978-3-030-32251-9_73 · DOI
Cited by
Sorted by citations
A review of uncertainty quantification in deep learning: Techniques, applications and challenges
Abdar, M., Pourpanah, F., Hussain, S., Rezazadegan, D., Liu, L., Ghavamzadeh, M., Fieguth, P., Cao, X., Khosravi, A., Acharya, U. R., et al. (2021) · Information Fusion · doi:10.1016/j.inffus.2021.05.008 · Cited by 3,111
U-Net and Its Variants for Medical Image Segmentation: A Review of Theory and Applications
Siddique, N. A., Paheding, S., Elkin, C. P., & Devabhaktuni, V. (2021) · IEEE Access · doi:10.1109/access.2021.3086020 · Cited by 2,185
A survey of uncertainty in deep neural networks
Gawlikowski, J., Tassi, C. R. N., Ali, M., Lee, J., Humt, M., Feng, J., Kruspe, A., Triebel, R., Jung, P., Roscher, R., et al. (2023) · Artificial Intelligence Review · doi:10.1007/s10462-023-10562-9 · Cited by 1,670
Recent advances and clinical applications of deep learning in medical image analysis
Chen, X., Wang, X., Zhang, K., Fung, K.-M. A., Thai, T., Moore, K. N., Mannel, R. S., Liu, H., Zheng, B., & Qiu, Y. (2022) · Medical Image Analysis · doi:10.1016/j.media.2022.102444 · Cited by 1,180
TransMorph: Transformer for unsupervised medical image registration
Chen, J., Frey, E. C., He, Y., Segars, W. P., Li, Y., & Du, Y. (2022) · Medical Image Analysis · doi:10.1016/j.media.2022.102615 · Cited by 883
Metadata
- Authors
- Mehrtash, A., Wells, W. M., Tempany, C. M., Abolmaesumi, P., & Kapur, T.
- Affiliations
- Brigham and Women's Hospital (US)
- University of British Columbia (CA)
- Venue
- IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
- Published
- 2020-12
- Volume
- 39
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- 3868-3878
- ISSN
- 0278-0062 (ISSN-L)
- 1558-254X
- PMC
- PMC7704933
- OpenAlex
- W2991523350
- Cited by
- 428
- References
- 55
- Citations by year
- 2026: 91 · 2025: 92 · 2024: 71 · 2023: 71 · 2022: 56 · 2021: 41 · 2020: 6
- FWCI
- 16.91
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Licence
- Locations
- IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- U.S. National Institutes of Health (P41EB015898)
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Medical Image Segmentation Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
- Keywords
- confidence calibration, predictive uncertainty estimation, medical image segmentation, fully convolutional network, U-Net, Dice loss, cross-entropy loss, model ensembling, out-of-distribution detection, batch normalization, brain segmentation, cardiac image segmentation, prostate segmentation
- MeSH terms
- Brain, Calibration, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Male, Neural Networks, Computer, Uncertainty
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review