Beyond Accuracy: Uncertainty-Guided Boundary Refinement for Reliable Biomedical Image Segmentation

📅 2026-09-11
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
该研究针对生物医学图像分割中边界不确定性问题,提出了一种基于可靠性感知的边界细化网络(RABR-Net),通过两阶段框架提高分割精度和边界可靠性。
📝 Abstract
Accurate biomedical image segmentation requires not only high global overlap but also reliable delineation of clinically meaningful boundaries. In blood-smear microscopy, cytoplasm and nucleus contours provide the structural basis for downstream morphology analysis; however, deep segmentation models may remain uncertain or overconfident near ambiguous boundary regions even when achieving strong Dice scores. This work proposes a Reliability-Aware Boundary Refinement Network (RABR-Net), a two-stage framework for trustworthy image segmentation. A strong UNet++ EfficientNet-B4 base segmenter first produces initial class probabilities and logits. Predictive entropy, test-time augmentation variance, margin uncertainty, probability gradients, and soft boundary cues are then combined into a boundary-aware reliability representation. This representation guides a gated residual refiner that selectively corrects uncertain boundary pixels while preserving confident regions of the base prediction. The framework is evaluated using overlap accuracy, class-wise Dice, Boundary Dice, HD95/ASSD, calibration, risk--coverage analysis, robustness under image perturbations, qualitative correction maps, and paired statistical testing. On the held-out test set, the proposed method improves Dice from 0.9602 to 0.9614, Boundary Dice from 0.3448 to 0.3611, and HD95 from 3.0354 to 2.8274 compared with the cached base prediction. Statistical analysis confirms significant improvements in Dice, Boundary Dice, and HD95. Qualitative results show that the learned gate concentrates around uncertain cytoplasm and nucleus boundaries, and correction maps confirm localized boundary refinement. Although calibration does not automatically improve after refinement, the proposed framework provides an interpretable and reliability-focused strategy for boundary-sensitive biomedical image segmentation.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Biomedical Image Segmentation
Uncertainty
Boundary Refinement
Reliability
Dice Score
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Boundary Refinement
Uncertainty-Guided
Biomedical Image Segmentation
Reliability-Aware
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Anima Kujur
Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Computing (IWR), Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany