Average Calibration Losses for Reliable Uncertainty in Medical Image Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Barfoot, Theodore, Garcia-Peraza-Herrera, Luis C., Akcay, Samet, Glocker, Ben, Vercauteren, Tom
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866918388604862464
author Barfoot, Theodore
Garcia-Peraza-Herrera, Luis C.
Akcay, Samet
Glocker, Ben
Vercauteren, Tom
author_facet Barfoot, Theodore
Garcia-Peraza-Herrera, Luis C.
Akcay, Samet
Glocker, Ben
Vercauteren, Tom
contents Deep neural networks for medical image segmentation are often overconfident, compromising both reliability and clinical utility. In this work, we propose differentiable formulations of marginal L1 Average Calibration Error (mL1-ACE) as an auxiliary loss that can be computed on a per-image basis. We compare both hard- and soft-binning approaches to directly improve pixel-wise calibration. Our experiments on four datasets (ACDC, AMOS, KiTS, BraTS) demonstrate that incorporating mL1-ACE significantly reduces calibration errors, particularly Average Calibration Error (ACE) and Maximum Calibration Error (MCE), while largely maintaining high Dice Similarity Coefficients (DSCs). We find that the soft-binned variant yields the greatest improvements in calibration over the DSC plus cross-entropy loss baseline but often compromises segmentation performance, with hard-binned mL1-ACE maintaining segmentation performance, albeit with weaker calibration improvement. To gain further insight into calibration performance and its variability across an imaging dataset, we introduce dataset reliability histograms, an aggregation of per-image reliability diagrams. The resulting analysis highlights improved alignment between predicted confidences and true accuracies. Overall, our approach provides practitioners with explicit control over the calibration-accuracy trade-off, enabling more reliable integration of deep learning methods into clinical workflows. We share our code here: https://github.com/cai4cai/Average-Calibration-Losses
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03942
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Average Calibration Losses for Reliable Uncertainty in Medical Image Segmentation
Barfoot, Theodore
Garcia-Peraza-Herrera, Luis C.
Akcay, Samet
Glocker, Ben
Vercauteren, Tom
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Deep neural networks for medical image segmentation are often overconfident, compromising both reliability and clinical utility. In this work, we propose differentiable formulations of marginal L1 Average Calibration Error (mL1-ACE) as an auxiliary loss that can be computed on a per-image basis. We compare both hard- and soft-binning approaches to directly improve pixel-wise calibration. Our experiments on four datasets (ACDC, AMOS, KiTS, BraTS) demonstrate that incorporating mL1-ACE significantly reduces calibration errors, particularly Average Calibration Error (ACE) and Maximum Calibration Error (MCE), while largely maintaining high Dice Similarity Coefficients (DSCs). We find that the soft-binned variant yields the greatest improvements in calibration over the DSC plus cross-entropy loss baseline but often compromises segmentation performance, with hard-binned mL1-ACE maintaining segmentation performance, albeit with weaker calibration improvement. To gain further insight into calibration performance and its variability across an imaging dataset, we introduce dataset reliability histograms, an aggregation of per-image reliability diagrams. The resulting analysis highlights improved alignment between predicted confidences and true accuracies. Overall, our approach provides practitioners with explicit control over the calibration-accuracy trade-off, enabling more reliable integration of deep learning methods into clinical workflows. We share our code here: https://github.com/cai4cai/Average-Calibration-Losses
title Average Calibration Losses for Reliable Uncertainty in Medical Image Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03942