Trustworthy Medical Image Segmentation with improved performance for in-distribution samples

Sneha Shukla, Lokendra Birla, Anup Kumar Gupta, Puneet Gupta

Abstract: Despite the enormous achievements of Deep Learning (DL) based models, their non-transparent nature led to restricted applicability and distrusted predictions. Such predictions emerge from erroneous In-Distribution (ID) and Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) samples, which results in disastrous effects in the medical domain, specifically in Medical Image Segmentation (MIS). To mitigate such effects, several existing works accomplish OOD sample detection; however, the trustworthiness issues from ID samples still require thorough investigation. To this end, a novel method TrustMIS (Trustworthy Medical Image Segmentation) is proposed in this paper, which provides the trustworthiness and improved performance of ID samples for DL-based MIS models. TrustMIS works in three folds: IT (Investigating Trustworthiness), INT (Improving Non-Trustworthy prediction) and CSO (Classifier Switching Operation). Initially, the IT method investigates the trustworthiness of MIS by leveraging similar characteristics and consistency analysis of input and its variants. Subsequently, the INT method employs the IT method to improve the performance of the MIS model. It leverages the observation that an input providing erroneous segmentation can provide correct segmentation with rotated input. Eventually, the CSO method employs the INT method to scrutinise several MIS models and selects the model that delivers the most trustworthy prediction. The experiments conducted on publicly available datasets using well-known MIS models reveal that TrustMIS has successfully provided a trustworthiness measure, outperformed the existing methods, and improved the performance of state-of-the-art MIS models. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/SnehaShukla937/TrustMIS.