The authors introduce a novel method for efficient Bayesian uncertainty estimation of the nnU-Net model, a state-of-the-art medical image segmentation framework. The key contributions are:
A novel variational inference (VI) approximation method that realizes efficient posterior estimation of the deep nnU-Net model, without modifying its original architecture.
An extension of the nnU-Net framework to incorporate the proposed uncertainty estimation, which significantly outperforms several baseline methods including Monte-Carlo Dropout and Deep Ensembles.
Further improvement of the segmentation performance beyond the original nnU-Net, as demonstrated on cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) datasets.
The authors leverage the optimization theory that during stochastic gradient descent (SGD), the network weights continuously explore the solution space, which is approximately equivalent to weight space posterior sampling. By taking appropriate weight checkpoints during SGD, the network can be sampled a posteriori, and uncertainty can be reflected in the agreement among these posterior models.
To capture multi-modal weight posterior distributions, the authors propose a cyclical learning rate scheme that periodically drives the weights out of the attraction region of a local optimum. The aggregated checkpoints from multiple training cycles are then used to build a multi-modal ensemble for Bayesian inference.
Experiments on in-domain and out-of-domain cardiac MRI datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms baseline uncertainty estimation techniques in both segmentation accuracy and calibration performance.
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