Statistical Management of the False Discovery Rate in Medical Instance Segmentation Based on Conformal Risk Control
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Apr 6, 2025
Abstract
Instance segmentation plays a pivotal role in medical image analysis by
enabling precise localization and delineation of lesions, tumors, and
anatomical structures. Although deep learning models such as Mask R-CNN and
BlendMask have achieved remarkable progress, their application in high-risk
medical scenarios remains constrained by confidence calibration issues, which
may lead to misdiagnosis. To address this challenge, we propose a robust
quality control framework based on conformal prediction theory. This framework
innovatively constructs a risk-aware dynamic threshold mechanism that
adaptively adjusts segmentation decision boundaries according to clinical
requirements.Specifically, we design a \textbf{calibration-aware loss function}
that dynamically tunes the segmentation threshold based on a user-defined risk
level $\alpha$. Utilizing exchangeable calibration data, this method ensures
that the expected FNR or FDR on test data remains below $\alpha$ with high
probability. The framework maintains compatibility with mainstream segmentation
models (e.g., Mask R-CNN, BlendMask+ResNet-50-FPN) and datasets (PASCAL VOC
format) without requiring architectural modifications. Empirical results
demonstrate that we rigorously bound the FDR metric marginally over the test
set via our developed calibration framework.