Informative and Reliable Tract Segmentation for Preoperative Planning

Identifying white matter (WM) tracts to locate eloquent areas for preoperative surgical planning is a challenging task. Manual WM tract annotations are often used but they are time-consuming, suffer from inter- and intra-rater variability, and noise intrinsic to diffusion MRI may make manual interpretation difficult. As a result, in clinical practice direct electrical stimulation is necessary to precisely locate WM tracts during surgery. A measure of WM tract segmentation unreliability could be important to guide surgical planning and operations. In this study, we use deep learning to perform reliable tract segmentation in combination with uncertainty quantification to measure segmentation unreliability. We use a 3D U-Net to segment white matter tracts. We then estimate model and data uncertainty using test time dropout and test time augmentation, respectively. We use a volume-based calibration approach to compute representative predicted probabilities from the estimated uncertainties. In our findings, we obtain a Dice of ≈0.82 which is comparable to the state-of-the-art for multi-label segmentation and Hausdorff distance <10mm. We demonstrate a high positive correlation between volume variance and segmentation errors, which indicates a good measure of reliability for tract segmentation ad uncertainty estimation. Finally, we show that calibrated predicted volumes are more likely to encompass the ground truth segmentation volume than uncalibrated predicted volumes. This study is a step toward more informed and reliable WM tract segmentation for clinical decision-making.