Medical image segmentation exhibits intra- and inter-annotator variability due to ambiguous object boundaries, annotator preferences, expertise, and tools, among other factors. Lesions with ambiguous boundaries, e.g., spiculated or infiltrative nodules, or irregular borders per the ABCD rule, are particularly prone to disagreement and are often associated with malignancy. In this work, we curate IMA++, the largest multi-annotator skin lesion segmentation dataset, on which we conduct an in-depth study of variability due to annotator, malignancy, tool, and skill factors. We find a statistically significant (p < 0.001) association between inter-annotator agreement (IAA), measured using Dice, and the malignancy of skin lesions. We further show that IAA can be accurately predicted directly from dermoscopic images, achieving a mean absolute error of 0.108. Finally, we leverage this association by utilizing IAA as a “soft” clinical feature within a multi-task learning objective, yielding a 4.2% improvement in balanced accuracy averaged across multiple model architectures and across IMA++ and four public dermoscopic datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/sfu-mial/skin-IAV .

错误:搜索内容不能为空,请输入英文关键词
错误:关键词超出字数限制,请精简
高级检索

What Can We Learn from Inter-Annotator Variability in Skin Lesion Segmentation?

  • Kumar Abhishek,
  • Jeremy Kawahara,
  • Ghassan Hamarneh

摘要

Medical image segmentation exhibits intra- and inter-annotator variability due to ambiguous object boundaries, annotator preferences, expertise, and tools, among other factors. Lesions with ambiguous boundaries, e.g., spiculated or infiltrative nodules, or irregular borders per the ABCD rule, are particularly prone to disagreement and are often associated with malignancy. In this work, we curate IMA++, the largest multi-annotator skin lesion segmentation dataset, on which we conduct an in-depth study of variability due to annotator, malignancy, tool, and skill factors. We find a statistically significant (p < 0.001) association between inter-annotator agreement (IAA), measured using Dice, and the malignancy of skin lesions. We further show that IAA can be accurately predicted directly from dermoscopic images, achieving a mean absolute error of 0.108. Finally, we leverage this association by utilizing IAA as a “soft” clinical feature within a multi-task learning objective, yielding a 4.2% improvement in balanced accuracy averaged across multiple model architectures and across IMA++ and four public dermoscopic datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/sfu-mial/skin-IAV .