Paper ID: 2112.10074

QU-BraTS: MICCAI BraTS 2020 Challenge on Quantifying Uncertainty in Brain Tumor Segmentation - Analysis of Ranking Scores and Benchmarking Results

Raghav Mehta, Angelos Filos, Ujjwal Baid, Chiharu Sako, Richard McKinley, Michael Rebsamen, Katrin Datwyler, Raphael Meier, Piotr Radojewski, Gowtham Krishnan Murugesan, Sahil Nalawade, Chandan Ganesh, Ben Wagner, Fang F. Yu, Baowei Fei, Ananth J. Madhuranthakam, Joseph A. Maldjian, Laura Daza, Catalina Gomez, Pablo Arbelaez, Chengliang Dai, Shuo Wang, Hadrien Reynaud, Yuan-han Mo, Elsa Angelini, Yike Guo, Wenjia Bai, Subhashis Banerjee, Lin-min Pei, Murat AK, Sarahi Rosas-Gonzalez, Ilyess Zemmoura, Clovis Tauber, Minh H. Vu, Tufve Nyholm, Tommy Lofstedt, Laura Mora Ballestar, Veronica Vilaplana, Hugh McHugh, Gonzalo Maso Talou, Alan Wang, Jay Patel, Ken Chang, Katharina Hoebel, Mishka Gidwani, Nishanth Arun, Sharut Gupta, Mehak Aggarwal, Praveer Singh, Elizabeth R. Gerstner, Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer, Nicolas Boutry, Alexis Huard, Lasitha Vidyaratne, Md Monibor Rahman, Khan M. Iftekharuddin, Joseph Chazalon, Elodie Puybareau, Guillaume Tochon, Jun Ma, Mariano Cabezas, Xavier Llado, Arnau Oliver, Liliana Valencia, Sergi Valverde, Mehdi Amian, Mohammadreza Soltaninejad, Andriy Myronenko, Ali Hatamizadeh, Xue Feng, Quan Dou, Nicholas Tustison, Craig Meyer, Nisarg A. Shah, Sanjay Talbar, Marc-Andre Weber, Abhishek Mahajan, Andras Jakab, Roland Wiest, Hassan M. Fathallah-Shaykh, Arash Nazeri, Mikhail Milchenko1, Daniel Marcus, Aikaterini Kotrotsou, Rivka Colen, John Freymann, Justin Kirby, Christos Davatzikos, Bjoern Menze, Spyridon Bakas, Yarin Gal, Tal Arbel

Deep learning (DL) models have provided state-of-the-art performance in various medical imaging benchmarking challenges, including the Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenges. However, the task of focal pathology multi-compartment segmentation (e.g., tumor and lesion sub-regions) is particularly challenging, and potential errors hinder translating DL models into clinical workflows. Quantifying the reliability of DL model predictions in the form of uncertainties could enable clinical review of the most uncertain regions, thereby building trust and paving the way toward clinical translation. Several uncertainty estimation methods have recently been introduced for DL medical image segmentation tasks. Developing scores to evaluate and compare the performance of uncertainty measures will assist the end-user in making more informed decisions. In this study, we explore and evaluate a score developed during the BraTS 2019 and BraTS 2020 task on uncertainty quantification (QU-BraTS) and designed to assess and rank uncertainty estimates for brain tumor multi-compartment segmentation. This score (1) rewards uncertainty estimates that produce high confidence in correct assertions and those that assign low confidence levels at incorrect assertions, and (2) penalizes uncertainty measures that lead to a higher percentage of under-confident correct assertions. We further benchmark the segmentation uncertainties generated by 14 independent participating teams of QU-BraTS 2020, all of which also participated in the main BraTS segmentation task. Overall, our findings confirm the importance and complementary value that uncertainty estimates provide to segmentation algorithms, highlighting the need for uncertainty quantification in medical image analyses. Finally, in favor of transparency and reproducibility, our evaluation code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/RagMeh11/QU-BraTS.

Submitted: Dec 19, 2021