Enhancing the Reliability of Medical AI through Expert-guided Uncertainty Modeling

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Khalin, Aleksei, Zaychenkova, Ekaterina, Yugay, Aleksandr, Goncharov, Andrey, Korchagin, Sergey, Zaytsev, Alexey, Ershov, Egor
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Khalin, Aleksei
Zaychenkova, Ekaterina
Yugay, Aleksandr
Goncharov, Andrey
Korchagin, Sergey
Zaytsev, Alexey
Ershov, Egor
author_facet Khalin, Aleksei
Zaychenkova, Ekaterina
Yugay, Aleksandr
Goncharov, Andrey
Korchagin, Sergey
Zaytsev, Alexey
Ershov, Egor
contents Artificial intelligence (AI) systems accelerate medical workflows and improve diagnostic accuracy in healthcare, serving as second-opinion systems. However, the unpredictability of AI errors poses a significant challenge, particularly in healthcare contexts, where mistakes can have severe consequences. A widely adopted safeguard is to pair predictions with uncertainty estimation, enabling human experts to focus on high-risk cases while streamlining routine verification. Current uncertainty estimation methods, however, remain limited, particularly in quantifying aleatoric uncertainty, which arises from data ambiguity and noise. To address this, we propose a novel approach that leverages disagreement in expert responses to generate targets for training machine learning models. These targets are used in conjunction with standard data labels to estimate two components of uncertainty separately, as given by the law of total variance, via a two-ensemble approach, as well as its lightweight variant. We validate our method on binary image classification, binary and multi-class image segmentation, and multiple-choice question answering. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating expert knowledge can enhance uncertainty estimation quality by $9\%$ to $50\%$ depending on the task, making this source of information invaluable for the construction of risk-aware AI systems in healthcare applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_01898
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing the Reliability of Medical AI through Expert-guided Uncertainty Modeling
Khalin, Aleksei
Zaychenkova, Ekaterina
Yugay, Aleksandr
Goncharov, Andrey
Korchagin, Sergey
Zaytsev, Alexey
Ershov, Egor
Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems accelerate medical workflows and improve diagnostic accuracy in healthcare, serving as second-opinion systems. However, the unpredictability of AI errors poses a significant challenge, particularly in healthcare contexts, where mistakes can have severe consequences. A widely adopted safeguard is to pair predictions with uncertainty estimation, enabling human experts to focus on high-risk cases while streamlining routine verification. Current uncertainty estimation methods, however, remain limited, particularly in quantifying aleatoric uncertainty, which arises from data ambiguity and noise. To address this, we propose a novel approach that leverages disagreement in expert responses to generate targets for training machine learning models. These targets are used in conjunction with standard data labels to estimate two components of uncertainty separately, as given by the law of total variance, via a two-ensemble approach, as well as its lightweight variant. We validate our method on binary image classification, binary and multi-class image segmentation, and multiple-choice question answering. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating expert knowledge can enhance uncertainty estimation quality by $9\%$ to $50\%$ depending on the task, making this source of information invaluable for the construction of risk-aware AI systems in healthcare applications.
title Enhancing the Reliability of Medical AI through Expert-guided Uncertainty Modeling
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01898