Asymmetric Contour Uncertainty Estimation for Medical Image Segmentation

Aleatoric uncertainty estimation is a critical step in medical image segmentation. Most techniques for estimating aleatoric uncertainty for segmentation purposes assume a Gaussian distribution over the neural network’s logit value modeling the uncertainty in the predicted class. However, in many cases, such as image segmentation, there is no uncertainty about the presence of a specific structure, but rather about the precise outline of that structure. For this reason, we explicitly model the location uncertainty by redefining the conventional per-pixel segmentation task as a contour regression problem. This allows for modeling the uncertainty of contour points using a more appropriate multivariate distribution. Additionally, as contour uncertainty may be asymmetric, we use a multivariate skewed Gaussian distribution. In addition to being directly interpretable, our uncertainty estimation method outperforms previous methods on three datasets using two different image modalities. Code is available here.