Subject-level Prediction of Segmentation Failure using Real-Time Convolutional Neural Nets

Robert Robinson, Ozan Oktay, Wenjia Bai, Vanya V. Valindria, Mihir M. Sanghvi, Nay Aung, José Miguel Paiva, Filip Zemrak, Kenneth Fung, Elena Lukaschuk, Aaron M. Lee, Valentina Carapella, Young Jin Kimm, Bernhard Kainz, Stefan K. Piechnik, Stefan Neubauer, Steffen E. Petersen, Chris Page, Daniel Rueckert, Ben Glocker

Abstract:

Occasionally even the best automated method fails due to low image quality, artifacts or unexpected behaviour of black box algorithms. Being able to predict segmentation quality in the absence of ground truth is of paramount importance in clinical practice, but also in large-scale studies to avoid the inclusion of invalid data in subsequent analysis.

In this work, we propose two approaches of real-time automated quality control for cardiovascular MR segmentations using deep learning. First, we train a neural network on 12,880 samples to predict Dice Similarity Coefficients (DSC) on a per-case basis. We report a mean average error (MAE) of 0.03 on 1,610 test samples and 97% binary classification accuracy for separating low and high quality segmentations. Secondly, in the scenario where no manually annotated data is available, we train a network to predict DSC scores from estimated quality obtained via a reverse testing strategy. We report an MAE = 0.14 and 91% binary classification accuracy for this case. Predictions are obtained in real-time which, when combined with real-time segmentation methods, enables instant feedback on whether an acquired scan is analyzable while the patient is still in the scanner.

Author Affiliation: Biomedical Image Analysis Group, Imperial College London, London, UK. Research and Development, GlaxoSmithKline, UK. William Harvey Research Institute, NIHR Barts Biomedical Research Centre, Queen Mary University London, UK. Barts Heart Centre, Barts Health NHS Trust, London, UK. Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Radcliffe Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, UK. Department of Radiology, Severance Hospital, Yonsei University College of Medicine, South Korea.

Keywords: real-time, automated quality control, segmentation, deep learning