Unsupervised Quality Control of Image Segmentation based on Bayesian Learning

Abstract : Assessing the quality of segmentations on an image database is required as many downstream clinical applications are based on segmentation results. For large databases, this quality assessment becomes tedious for a human expert and therefore some automation of this task is necessary. In this paper, we introduce a novel unsupervised approach to assist the quality control of image segmentations by measuring their adequacy with segmentations produced by a generic probabilistic model. To this end, we introduce a new segmentation model combining intensity and a spatial prior %which enforces the smoothness of the prior label probability defined through a combination of spatially smooth kernels. The tractability of the approach is obtained by solving a type-II maximum likelihood which directly estimates hyperparameters. Assessing the quality of the segmentation with respect to the probabilistic model allows to detect the most challenging cases inside a dataset. This approach was evaluated on the BRATS 2017 and ACDC datasets showing its relevance for quality control assessment.