Paper Detail

Budget-Aware Uncertainty for Radiotherapy Segmentation QA Using nnU-Net

Ricardo Coimbra Brioso, Lorenzo Mondo, Damiano Dei, Nicola Lambri, Pietro Mancosu, Marta Scorsetti, Daniele Loiacono

arxiv Score 7.3

Published 2026-04-13 · First seen 2026-04-14

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Abstract

Accurate delineation of the Clinical Target Volume (CTV) is essential for radiotherapy planning, yet remains time-consuming and difficult to assess, especially for complex treatments such as Total Marrow and Lymph Node Irradiation (TMLI). While deep learning-based auto-segmentation can reduce workload, safe clinical deployment requires reliable cues indicating where models may be wrong. In this work, we propose a budget-aware uncertainty-driven quality assurance (QA) framework built on nnU-Net, combining uncertainty quantification and post-hoc calibration to produce voxel-wise uncertainty maps (based on predictive entropy) that can guide targeted manual review. We compare temperature scaling (TS), deep ensembles (DE), checkpoint ensembles (CE), and test-time augmentation (TTA), evaluated both individually and in combination on TMLI as a representative use case. Reliability is assessed through ROI-masked calibration metrics and uncertainty--error alignment under realistic revision constraints, summarized as AUC over the top 0-5% most uncertain voxels. Across configurations, segmentation accuracy remains stable, whereas TS substantially improves calibration. Uncertainty-error alignment improves most with calibrated checkpoint-based inference, leading to uncertainty maps that highlight more consistently regions requiring manual edits. Overall, integrating calibration with efficient ensembling seems a promising strategy to implement a budget-aware QA workflow for radiotherapy segmentation.

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BibTeX

@article{brioso2026budget,
  title = {Budget-Aware Uncertainty for Radiotherapy Segmentation QA Using nnU-Net},
  author = {Ricardo Coimbra Brioso and Lorenzo Mondo and Damiano Dei and Nicola Lambri and Pietro Mancosu and Marta Scorsetti and Daniele Loiacono},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Accurate delineation of the Clinical Target Volume (CTV) is essential for radiotherapy planning, yet remains time-consuming and difficult to assess, especially for complex treatments such as Total Marrow and Lymph Node Irradiation (TMLI). While deep learning-based auto-segmentation can reduce workload, safe clinical deployment requires reliable cues indicating where models may be wrong. In this work, we propose a budget-aware uncertainty-driven quality assurance (QA) framework built on nnU-Net, },
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11798},
  keywords = {cs.CV, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2604.11798},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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