SoftDropConnect (SDC) -- Effective and Efficient Quantification of the Network Uncertainty in Deep MR Image Analysis

Recently, deep learning has achieved remarkable successes in medical image analysis. Although deep neural networks generate clinically important predictions, they have inherent uncertainty. Such uncertainty is a major barrier to report these predictions with confidence. In this paper, we propose a novel yet simple Bayesian inference approach called SoftDropConnect (SDC) to quantify the network uncertainty in medical imaging tasks with gliomas segmentation and metastases classification as initial examples. Our key idea is that during training and testing SDC modulates network parameters continuously so as to allow affected information processing channels still in operation, instead of disabling them as Dropout or DropConnet does. When compared with three popular Bayesian inference methods including Bayes By Backprop, Dropout, and DropConnect, our SDC method (SDC-W after optimization) outperforms the three competing methods with a substantial margin. Quantitatively, our proposed method generates results withsubstantially improved prediction accuracy (by 10.0%, 5.4% and 3.7% respectively for segmentation in terms of dice score; by 11.7%, 3.9%, 8.7% on classification in terms of test accuracy) and greatly reduced uncertainty in terms of mutual information (by 64%, 33% and 70% on segmentation; 98%, 88%, and 88% on classification). Our approach promises to deliver better diagnostic performance and make medical AI imaging more explainable and trustworthy.