Average Calibration Error: A Differentiable Loss for Improved Reliability in Image Segmentation

Deep neural networks for medical image segmentation often produce overconfident results misaligned with empirical observations. Such miscalibration, challenges their clinical translation. We propose to use marginal L1 average calibration error (mL1-ACE) as a novel auxiliary loss function to improve pixel-wise calibration without compromising segmentation quality. We show that this loss, despite using hard binning, is directly differentiable, bypassing the need for approximate but differentiable surrogate or soft binning approaches. Our work also introduces the concept of dataset reliability histograms which generalises standard reliability diagrams for refined visual assessment of calibration in semantic segmentation aggregated at the dataset level. Using mL1-ACE, we reduce average and maximum calibration error by 45% and 55% respectively, maintaining a Dice score of 87% on the BraTS 2021 dataset. We share our code here: https://github.com/cai4cai/ACE-DLIRIS

Multiple Instance Learning with Auxiliary Task Weighting for Multiple Myeloma Classification

Whole body magnetic resonance imaging (WB-MRI) is the recommended modality for diagnosis of multiple myeloma (MM). WB-MRI is used to detect sites of disease across the entire skeletal system, but it requires significant expertise and is time-consuming to report due to the great number of images. To aid radiological reading, we propose an auxiliary task-based multiple instance learning approach (ATMIL) for MM classification with the ability to localize sites of disease. This approach is appealing as it only requires patient-level annotations where an attention mechanism is used to identify local regions with active disease. We borrow ideas from multi-task learning and define an auxiliary task with adaptive reweighting to support and improve learning efficiency in the presence of data scarcity. We validate our approach on both synthetic and real multi-center clinical data. We show that the MIL attention module provides a mechanism to localize bone regions while the adaptive reweighting of the auxiliary task considerably improves the performance.