Arbel, Tal

Arnold, Douglas L.

Cardinell, Jillian

Falet, Jean-Pierre R.

Mehta, Raghav

Nichyporuk, Brennan

Szeto, Justin

Tsaftaris, Sotirios A.

English

Generalization is an important attribute of machine learning models, particularly for those that are to be deployed in a medical context, where unreliable predictions can have real world consequences. While the failure of models to generalize across datasets is typically attributed to a mismatch in the data distributions, performance gaps are often a consequence of biases in the 'ground-truth' label annotations. This is particularly important in the context of medical image segmentation of pathological structures (e.g. lesions), where the annotation process is much more subjective, and affected by a number underlying factors, including the annotation protocol, rater education/experience, and clinical aims, among others. In this paper, we show that modeling annotation biases, rather than ignoring them, poses a promising way of accounting for differences in annotation style across datasets. To this end, we propose a generalized conditioning framework to (1) learn and account for different annotation styles across multiple datasets using a single model, (2) identify similar annotation styles across different datasets in order to permit their effective aggregation, and (3) fine-tune a fully trained model to a new annotation style with just a few samples. Next, we present an image-conditioning approach to model annotation styles that correlate with specific image features, potentially enabling detection biases to be more easily identified

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Rethinking Generalization:The Impact of Annotation Style on Medical Image Segmentation

https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/files/333234725/2210.17398v3.pdf

Rethinking Generalization:The Impact of Annotation Style on Medical Image Segmentation

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