HyTver: A Novel Loss Function for Longitudinal Multiple Sclerosis Lesion Segmentation

TL;DR

HyTver is a new hybrid loss function designed for longitudinal MS lesion segmentation, balancing segmentation accuracy and metric stability, addressing data imbalance issues effectively.

Contribution

The paper introduces HyTver, a novel loss function that improves segmentation performance and metric stability in longitudinal MS lesion segmentation tasks.

Findings

Achieved a Dice score of 0.659 with HyTver.

Maintains performance across multiple metrics.

Demonstrates stability on pre-trained models.

Abstract

Longitudinal Multiple Sclerosis Lesion Segmentation is a particularly challenging problem that involves both input and output imbalance in the data and segmentation. Therefore in order to develop models that are practical, one of the solutions is to develop better loss functions. Most models naively use either Dice loss or Cross-Entropy loss or their combination without too much consideration. However, one must select an appropriate loss function as the imbalance can be mitigated by selecting a proper loss function. In order to solve the imbalance problem, multiple loss functions were proposed that claimed to solve it. They come with problems of their own which include being too computationally complex due to hyperparameters as exponents or having detrimental performance in metrics other than region-based ones. We propose a novel hybrid loss called HyTver that achieves good segmentation performance while maintaining performance in other metrics. We achieve a Dice score of 0.659 while also ensuring that the distance-based metrics are comparable to other popular functions. In addition, we also evaluate the stability of the loss functions when used on a pre- trained model and perform extensive comparisons with other popular loss functions