Towards Reducing Aleatoric Uncertainty for Medical Imaging Tasks

21 Oct 2021  ·  Abhishek Singh Sambyal, Narayanan C. Krishnan, Deepti R. Bathula ·

In safety-critical applications like medical diagnosis, certainty associated with a model's prediction is just as important as its accuracy. Consequently, uncertainty estimation and reduction play a crucial role. Uncertainty in predictions can be attributed to noise or randomness in data (aleatoric) and incorrect model inferences (epistemic). While model uncertainty can be reduced with more data or bigger models, aleatoric uncertainty is more intricate. This work proposes a novel approach that interprets data uncertainty estimated from a self-supervised task as noise inherent to the data and utilizes it to reduce aleatoric uncertainty in another task related to the same dataset via data augmentation. The proposed method was evaluated on a benchmark medical imaging dataset with image reconstruction as the self-supervised task and segmentation as the image analysis task. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in significantly reducing the aleatoric uncertainty in the image segmentation task while achieving better or on-par performance compared to the standard augmentation techniques.

PDF Abstract

Datasets


  Add Datasets introduced or used in this paper

Results from the Paper


  Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

Methods


No methods listed for this paper. Add relevant methods here