通过假设驱动选择,让脑肿瘤分割更安全可靠。
HD-TTA: Hypothesis-Driven Test-Time Adaptation for Safer Brain Tumor Segmentation
- 提出两种几何假设:收缩去噪、膨胀补漏,动态选择最优结果
- 在儿童和复杂脑膜瘤数据上,精度提升超4%,95%豪斯多夫距离降低6.4毫米
- 适合医疗影像安全部署,尤其对易误判区域有保护机制
标准测试时自适应(TTA)方法通常将推理视为盲优化任务,对所有或筛选后的测试样本应用通用目标。在安全关键的医学分割中,这种缺乏选择性常导致肿瘤掩码渗入健康脑组织或使原本正确的预测退化。我们提出假设驱动的测试时自适应(HD-TTA),将适应过程重构为动态决策机制。该方法生成直观的对抗性几何假设:压缩(预测是否噪声?去除伪影)与膨胀(有效肿瘤是否欠分割?安全扩大以恢复)。随后,利用基于表征的筛选器,根据内在纹理一致性自主识别最安全的结果。此外,预筛查门控器可跳过高置信度案例的适应,防止负迁移。我们在跨域二值脑肿瘤分割任务上验证该方法,使用在成人BraTS胶质瘤上训练的源模型,应用于未见过的儿童及更具挑战性的脑膜瘤目标域。HD-TTA在严苛的安全性条件下优于多个先进基线,将95%豪斯多夫距离(HD95)降低约6.4毫米,精度提升超过4%,同时保持相近的Dice分数。结果表明,通过显式假设选择解决安全与适应之间的权衡是可行且鲁棒的,为临床安全部署提供新路径。代码将在录用后公开。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Standard Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods typically treat inference as a blind optimization task, applying generic objectives to all or filtered test samples. In safety-critical medical segmentation, this lack of selectivity often causes the tumor mask to spill into healthy brain tissue or degrades predictions that were already correct. We propose Hypothesis-Driven TTA, a novel framework that reformulates adaptation as a dynamic decision process. Rather than forcing a single optimization trajectory, our method generates intuitive competing geometric hypotheses: compaction (is the prediction noisy? trim artifacts) versus inflation (is the valid tumor under-segmented? safely inflate to recover). It then employs a representation-guided selector to autonomously identify the safest outcome based on intrinsic texture consistency. Additionally, a pre-screening Gatekeeper prevents negative transfer by skipping adaptation on confident cases. We validate this proof-of-concept on a cross-domain binary brain tumor segmentation task, applying a source model trained on adult BraTS gliomas to unseen pediatric and more challenging meningioma target domains. HD-TTA improves safety-oriented outcomes (Hausdorff Distance (HD95) and Precision) over several state-of-the-art representative baselines in the challenging safety regime, reducing the HD95 by approximately 6.4 mm and improving Precision by over 4%, while maintaining comparable Dice scores. These results demonstrate that resolving the safety-adaptation trade-off via explicit hypothesis selection is a viable, robust path for safe clinical model deployment. Code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
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