多维校准主动探测的超声图像分割

Multi-Dimensional Calibrated Active Probing for Ultrasound Image Segmentation

  • 摘要: 现有的不确定性引导学习框架通常依赖被动的像素选择策略,难以有效区分由物理噪声引起的偶然不确定性与模型自身的认知不确定性,导致采样资源被不可学习的噪声区域过度占用。本文提出一种多维校准的主动探测框架(MC-AP),用于超声图像中解剖结构的实例级分割。该框架引入基于可学习查询机制的注意力采样头,将传统的被动、不可微像素筛选转化为特征空间中端到端可微的主动探测过程,实现了采样策略与分割网络的协同演化。为了在混杂的不确定性中滤除噪声干扰,本文从多维度对主动探测机制进行校准:在物理维度,引入图像梯度引导的结构先验约束,迫使探针聚焦于真实的解剖边界;在概率与性能维度,显式建模预测分布的置信水平,并设计难度增强的采样奖励函数,使优化过程持续聚焦于持续性预测偏差较大的认知困难区域。此外,施加空间多样性约束以确保采样点对复杂解剖结构的完整覆盖。在MEIS和TN3K等具有挑战性的超声数据集上的实验结果表明,MC-AP的掩码平均精度均值(Mask-mAP)分别达到57.01%和51.17%。结果表明,主动采样与多维校准相结合,有助于减轻噪声干扰、定位困难区域并提升超声图像实例分割性能。

     

    Abstract: Existing uncertainty-guided learning frameworks typically rely on passive pixel selection strategies and struggle to effectively distinguish aleatoric uncertainty arising from physical noise from the model’s epistemic uncertainty, resulting in excessive allocation of sampling resources to unlearnable noise regions. This paper proposes a multi-dimensional calibrated active probing (MC-AP) framework for instance-level segmentation of anatomical structures in ultrasound images. The framework introduces an attention-based sampling head with a learnable query mechanism, transforming traditional passive, non-differentiable pixel selection into an end-to-end differentiable active probing process in the feature space, thereby enabling the co-evolution of the sampling strategy and the segmentation network. To filter out noise interference within mixed uncertainties, the active probing mechanism is calibrated across multiple dimensions: in the physical dimension, an image-gradient-guided structural prior constraint is introduced to force the probes to focus on true anatomical boundaries; in the probabilistic and performance dimensions, the confidence of the predictive distribution is explicitly modeled, and a difficulty-enhanced sampling reward function is designed to keep the optimization process focused on cognitively difficult regions with large persistent prediction errors. In addition, a spatial diversity constraint is imposed to ensure complete coverage of complex anatomical structures by the sampling points. Experimental results on challenging ultrasound datasets, including MEIS and TN3K, show that MC-AP achieves mask mean average precision (Mask-mAP) values of 57.01% and 51.17%, respectively. These results indicate that combining active sampling with multi-dimensional calibration helps mitigate noise interference, locate difficult regions, and improve ultrasound image instance segmentation performance.

     

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