Twofold binary image consensus for medical imaging meta-analysis

Abstract

In the field of medical imaging, ground truth is often gathered from groups of experts, whose outputs are generally heterogeneous. This procedure raises questions on how to compare the results obtained by automatic algorithms to multiple ground truth items. Secondarily, it raises questions on the meaning of the divergences between experts. In this work, we focus on the case of immunohistochemistry image segmentation and analysis. We propose measures to quantify the divergence in groups of ground truth images, and we observe their behaviour. These measures are based upon fusion techniques for binary images, which is a common example of non-monotone data fusion process. Our measures can be used not only in this specific field of medical imagery, but also in any task related to meta-quality evaluation for image processing, e.g. ground truth validation or expert rating.