Paper ID: 2408.08432

Predictive uncertainty estimation in deep learning for lung carcinoma classification in digital pathology under real dataset shifts

Abdur R. Fayjie, Jutika Borah, Florencia Carbone, Jan Tack, Patrick Vandewalle

Deep learning has shown tremendous progress in a wide range of digital pathology and medical image classification tasks. Its integration into safe clinical decision-making support requires robust and reliable models. However, real-world data comes with diversities that often lie outside the intended source distribution. Moreover, when test samples are dramatically different, clinical decision-making is greatly affected. Quantifying predictive uncertainty in models is crucial for well-calibrated predictions and determining when (or not) to trust a model. Unfortunately, many works have overlooked the importance of predictive uncertainty estimation. This paper evaluates whether predictive uncertainty estimation adds robustness to deep learning-based diagnostic decision-making systems. We investigate the effect of various carcinoma distribution shift scenarios on predictive performance and calibration. We first systematically investigate three popular methods for improving predictive uncertainty: Monte Carlo dropout, deep ensemble, and few-shot learning on lung adenocarcinoma classification as a primary disease in whole slide images. Secondly, we compare the effectiveness of the methods in terms of performance and calibration under clinically relevant distribution shifts such as in-distribution shifts comprising primary disease sub-types and other characterization analysis data; out-of-distribution shifts comprising well-differentiated cases, different organ origin, and imaging modality shifts. While studies on uncertainty estimation exist, to our best knowledge, no rigorous large-scale benchmark compares predictive uncertainty estimation including these dataset shifts for lung carcinoma classification.

Submitted: Aug 15, 2024