Diffusion-Based Quality Control of Medical Image Segmentations across Organs

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Hauptverfasser: Marcianò, Vincenzo, Chaptoukaev, Hava, Fernandez, Virginia, Cardoso, M. Jorge, Ourselin, Sébastien, Antonelli, Michela, Zuluaga, Maria A.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Marcianò, Vincenzo
Chaptoukaev, Hava
Fernandez, Virginia
Cardoso, M. Jorge
Ourselin, Sébastien
Antonelli, Michela
Zuluaga, Maria A.
author_facet Marcianò, Vincenzo
Chaptoukaev, Hava
Fernandez, Virginia
Cardoso, M. Jorge
Ourselin, Sébastien
Antonelli, Michela
Zuluaga, Maria A.
contents Medical image segmentation using deep learning (DL) has enabled the development of automated analysis pipelines for large-scale population studies. However, state-of-the-art DL methods are prone to hallucinations, which can result in anatomically implausible segmentations. With manual correction impractical at scale, automated quality control (QC) techniques have to address the challenge. While promising, existing QC methods are organ-specific, limiting their generalizability and usability beyond their original intended task. To overcome this limitation, we propose no-new Quality Control (nnQC), a robust QC framework based on a diffusion-generative paradigm that self-adapts to any input organ dataset. Central to nnQC is a novel Team of Experts (ToE) architecture, where two specialized experts independently encode 3D spatial awareness, represented by the relative spatial position of an axial slice, and anatomical information derived from visual features from the original image. A weighted conditional module dynamically combines the pair of independent embeddings, or opinions to condition the sampling mechanism within a diffusion process, enabling the generation of a spatially aware pseudo-ground truth for predicting QC scores. Within its framework, nnQC integrates fingerprint adaptation to ensure adaptability across organs, datasets, and imaging modalities. We evaluated nnQC on seven organs using twelve publicly available datasets. Our results demonstrate that nnQC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all experiments, including cases where segmentation masks are highly degraded or completely missing, confirming its versatility and effectiveness across different organs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09588
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Diffusion-Based Quality Control of Medical Image Segmentations across Organs
Marcianò, Vincenzo
Chaptoukaev, Hava
Fernandez, Virginia
Cardoso, M. Jorge
Ourselin, Sébastien
Antonelli, Michela
Zuluaga, Maria A.
Image and Video Processing
Quantitative Methods
Medical image segmentation using deep learning (DL) has enabled the development of automated analysis pipelines for large-scale population studies. However, state-of-the-art DL methods are prone to hallucinations, which can result in anatomically implausible segmentations. With manual correction impractical at scale, automated quality control (QC) techniques have to address the challenge. While promising, existing QC methods are organ-specific, limiting their generalizability and usability beyond their original intended task. To overcome this limitation, we propose no-new Quality Control (nnQC), a robust QC framework based on a diffusion-generative paradigm that self-adapts to any input organ dataset. Central to nnQC is a novel Team of Experts (ToE) architecture, where two specialized experts independently encode 3D spatial awareness, represented by the relative spatial position of an axial slice, and anatomical information derived from visual features from the original image. A weighted conditional module dynamically combines the pair of independent embeddings, or opinions to condition the sampling mechanism within a diffusion process, enabling the generation of a spatially aware pseudo-ground truth for predicting QC scores. Within its framework, nnQC integrates fingerprint adaptation to ensure adaptability across organs, datasets, and imaging modalities. We evaluated nnQC on seven organs using twelve publicly available datasets. Our results demonstrate that nnQC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all experiments, including cases where segmentation masks are highly degraded or completely missing, confirming its versatility and effectiveness across different organs.
title Diffusion-Based Quality Control of Medical Image Segmentations across Organs
topic Image and Video Processing
Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09588