arXiv:2510.15541cs.LGcs.CV2025-10

研究发现,MC Dropout的方差不确定性对脑肿瘤分割误差定位效果有限。

An Empirical Study on Variance-based MC Dropout Uncertainty-Error Correlation in 2D Brain Tumor Segmentation

  • 用50次随机前向传播计算像素级方差作为不确定性
  • 全局相关性仅0.30-0.38,边界处几乎无相关性
  • 建议改用熵或互信息等替代表示方式

从MRI中准确分割脑肿瘤对诊断和治疗规划至关重要。尽管蒙特卡洛(MC)Dropout被广泛用于估计模型不确定性,但基于方差的不确定性——即通过多次随机前向传播计算的像素级方差——在识别分割误差,特别是肿瘤边界附近的误差方面,仍缺乏充分研究。本研究通过在四种增强设置(无增强、水平翻转、旋转、缩放)下训练的U-Net,实证考察了2D脑肿瘤MRI分割中方差型MC Dropout不确定性与分割误差之间的关系。不确定性通过50次随机前向传播的像素级方差进行估计,并使用皮尔逊和斯皮尔曼相关系数分析其与像素级误差的相关性。结果表明,全局相关性较弱(r ~ 0.30–0.38),边界相关性可忽略不计(|r| < 0.05)。尽管不同增强策略间差异具有统计显著性(p < 0.001),但缺乏实际意义。这些发现表明,基于方差的MC Dropout不确定性对全局及边界误差定位提供有限线索,且不确定性表示方式的选择会显著影响MC Dropout在医学图像分割中的实用性。建议采用预测熵或互信息等替代形式,可能更有效捕捉分割误差,尤其在边界区域。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Accurate brain tumor segmentation from MRI is vital for diagnosis and treatment planning. Although Monte Carlo (MC) Dropout is widely used to estimate model uncertainty, the effectiveness of variance-based uncertainty - computed as pixel-wise variance across stochastic forward passes - in identifying segmentation errors, particularly near tumor boundaries, remains insufficiently studied. This study empirically examines the relationship between variance-based MC Dropout uncertainty and segmentation error in 2D brain tumor MRI segmentation using a U-Net trained under four augmentation settings: none, horizontal flip, rotation, and scaling. Uncertainty was estimated as the pixel-wise variance across 50 stochastic forward passes and correlated with pixel-wise errors using Pearson and Spearman coefficients. Results show weak global correlations (r ~ 0.30-0.38) and negligible boundary correlations (|r| < 0.05). Although differences across augmentations were statistically significant (p < 0.001), they lacked practical relevance. These findings suggest that variance-based MC Dropout uncertainty provides limited cues for global and boundary error localization, and that the choice of uncertainty representation critically affects the utility of MC Dropout in medical image segmentation. Alternative representations such as predictive entropy or mutual information may better capture segmentation errors, particularly at boundaries.

医学图像不确定性分割深度学习

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