COMPASS: Robust Feature Conformal Prediction for Medical Segmentation Metrics

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Cheung, Matt Y., Veeraraghavan, Ashok, Balakrishnan, Guha
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Cheung, Matt Y.
Veeraraghavan, Ashok
Balakrishnan, Guha
author_facet Cheung, Matt Y.
Veeraraghavan, Ashok
Balakrishnan, Guha
contents In clinical applications, the utility of segmentation models is often based on the accuracy of derived downstream metrics such as organ size, rather than by the pixel-level accuracy of the segmentation masks themselves. Thus, uncertainty quantification for such metrics is crucial for decision-making. Conformal prediction (CP) is a popular framework to derive such principled uncertainty guarantees, but applying CP naively to the final scalar metric is inefficient because it treats the complex, non-linear segmentation-to-metric pipeline as a black box. We introduce COMPASS, a practical framework that generates efficient, metric-based CP intervals for image segmentation models by leveraging the inductive biases of their underlying deep neural networks. COMPASS performs calibration directly in the model's representation space by perturbing intermediate features along low-dimensional subspaces maximally sensitive to the target metric. We prove that COMPASS achieves valid marginal coverage under the assumption of exchangeability. Empirically, we demonstrate that COMPASS produces significantly tighter intervals than traditional CP baselines on four medical image segmentation tasks for area estimation of skin lesions and anatomical structures. Furthermore, we show that leveraging learned internal features to estimate importance weights allows COMPASS to also recover target coverage under covariate shifts. COMPASS paves the way for practical, metric-based uncertainty quantification for medical image segmentation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_22240
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle COMPASS: Robust Feature Conformal Prediction for Medical Segmentation Metrics
Cheung, Matt Y.
Veeraraghavan, Ashok
Balakrishnan, Guha
Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Applications
In clinical applications, the utility of segmentation models is often based on the accuracy of derived downstream metrics such as organ size, rather than by the pixel-level accuracy of the segmentation masks themselves. Thus, uncertainty quantification for such metrics is crucial for decision-making. Conformal prediction (CP) is a popular framework to derive such principled uncertainty guarantees, but applying CP naively to the final scalar metric is inefficient because it treats the complex, non-linear segmentation-to-metric pipeline as a black box. We introduce COMPASS, a practical framework that generates efficient, metric-based CP intervals for image segmentation models by leveraging the inductive biases of their underlying deep neural networks. COMPASS performs calibration directly in the model's representation space by perturbing intermediate features along low-dimensional subspaces maximally sensitive to the target metric. We prove that COMPASS achieves valid marginal coverage under the assumption of exchangeability. Empirically, we demonstrate that COMPASS produces significantly tighter intervals than traditional CP baselines on four medical image segmentation tasks for area estimation of skin lesions and anatomical structures. Furthermore, we show that leveraging learned internal features to estimate importance weights allows COMPASS to also recover target coverage under covariate shifts. COMPASS paves the way for practical, metric-based uncertainty quantification for medical image segmentation.
title COMPASS: Robust Feature Conformal Prediction for Medical Segmentation Metrics
topic Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22240