Predicting semantic segmentation quality in laryngeal endoscopy images.

Journal: PloS one
Published Date:

Abstract

Endoscopy is a major tool for assessing the physiology of inner organs. Contemporary artificial intelligence methods are used to fully automatically label medical important classes on a pixel-by-pixel level. This so-called semantic segmentation is for example used to detect cancer tissue or to assess laryngeal physiology. However, due to the diversity of patients presenting, it is necessary to judge the segmentation quality. In this study, we present a fully automatic system to evaluate the segmentation performance in laryngeal endoscopy images. We showcase on glottal area segmentation that the predicted segmentation quality represented by the intersection over union metric is on par with human raters. Using a traffic light system, we are able to identify problematic segmentation frames to allow human-in-the-loop improvements, important for the clinical adaptation of automatic analysis procedures.

Authors

  • Andreas M Kist
    Division of Phoniatrics and Pediatric Audiology, Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, University Hospital Erlangen, Germany.
  • Sina Razi
    Department Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical Engineering (AIBE), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany.
  • René Groh
    Department Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical Engineering (AIBE), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany.
  • Florian Gritsch
    Department Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical Engineering (AIBE), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany.
  • Anne Schützenberger
    Division of Phoniatrics and Pediatric Audiology, Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, University Hospital Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Waldstraße 1, 91054, Erlangen, Germany.