用方向性扩散建模医学影像模糊边界,让不同专家的分割差异更真实可信。
Volumetric Directional Diffusion: Anchoring Uncertainty Quantification in Anatomical Consensus for Ambiguous Medical Image Segmentation
- 以共识轮廓为锚点,通过残差扩散探索边界可能变化
- 在三个数据集上同时提升不确定性分布匹配度与3D结构一致性
- 适合需要评估医生间差异的医学图像分割任务
模糊的三维医学图像分割常面临专家标注不一致但都合理的情况。传统确定性模型虽保持解剖结构连贯,却将分歧压缩为单一结果;随机生成模型可产生多样性样本,但在从无结构噪声生成完整3D掩码时易出现断裂或层间不一致。我们提出体积方向扩散(VDD),一种基于先验锚点的扩散框架,将随机生成从全掩码合成转为残差边界探索。VDD以粗粒度共识预测作为解剖锚点,学习方向性扩散过程,在模糊区域生成符合临床实际的边界变异,同时保持稳定的体积拓扑结构。在三个多标注者数据集(LIDC-IDRI、KiTS21、ISBI 2015)上的实验表明,VDD在保持良好分割精度和3D结构一致性的同时,显著提升了不确定性分布的对齐效果。结果表明,基于先验锚定的残差扩散可在不牺牲解剖保真度的前提下,有效建模具有临床意义的专家分歧。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Ambiguous 3D medical image segmentation often involves boundaries where different expert delineations are non-identical yet clinically plausible. Modeling such inter-observer variability requires a careful balance between diversity and anatomical fidelity: deterministic models preserve coherent volumetric structures but collapse expert disagreement into a single mask, while stochastic generative models can produce diverse samples but may introduce disconnected components or slice-to-slice inconsistency when generating full 3D masks from unstructured noise. We propose Volumetric Directional Diffusion (VDD), a prior-anchored diffusion framework that shifts stochastic generation from full-mask synthesis to residual boundary exploration. VDD uses a coarse consensus prediction as an anatomical anchor and learns a directional diffusion process to generate plausible boundary variations around ambiguous regions while preserving stable volumetric topology. Experiments on three multi-rater datasets, including LIDC-IDRI, KiTS21, and ISBI 2015, show that VDD improves uncertainty distribution alignment while maintaining competitive segmentation accuracy and 3D structural consistency. These results suggest that prior-anchored residual diffusion can model clinically plausible expert disagreement without sacrificing anatomical fidelity.
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