Delving Aleatoric Uncertainty in Medical Image Segmentation via Vision Foundation Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach leveraging vision foundation models to estimate and utilize aleatoric uncertainty in medical image segmentation, improving robustness and accuracy across multiple datasets.

Contribution

It systematically explores intrinsic data uncertainty using feature diversity and singular value energy, proposing uncertainty-aware filtering and training strategies.

Findings

Significant performance improvements on five public datasets.

Effective noise filtering and adaptive loss weighting enhance model robustness.

Broad applicability across different network architectures.

Abstract

Medical image segmentation supports clinical workflows by precisely delineating anatomical structures and lesions. However, medical image datasets medical image datasets suffer from acquisition noise and annotation ambiguity, causing pervasive data uncertainty that substantially undermines model robustness. Existing research focuses primarily on model architectural improvements and predictive reliability estimation, while systematic exploration of the intrinsic data uncertainty remains insufficient. To address this gap, this work proposes leveraging the universal representation capabilities of visual foundation models to estimate inherent data uncertainty. Specifically, we analyze the feature diversity of the model's decoded representations and quantify their singular value energy to define the semantic perception scale for each class, thereby measuring sample difficulty and aleatoric uncertainty. Based on this foundation, we design two uncertainty-driven application strategies: (1) the aleatoric uncertainty-aware data filtering mechanism to eliminate potentially noisy samples and enhance model learning quality; (2) the dynamic uncertainty-aware optimization strategy that adaptively adjusts class-specific loss weights during training based on the semantic perception scale, combined with a label denoising mechanism to improve training stability. Experimental results on five public datasets encompassing CT and MRI modalities and involving multi-organ and tumor segmentation tasks demonstrate that our method achieves significant and robust performance improvements across various mainstream network architectures, revealing the broad application potential of aleatoric uncertainty in medical image understanding and segmentation tasks.