Using Monte Carlo dropout and bootstrap aggregation for uncertainty estimation in radiation therapy dose prediction with deep learning neural networks

Recently, artificial intelligence technologies and algorithms have become a major focus for advancements in treatment planning for radiation therapy. As these are starting to become incorporated into the clinical workflow, a major concern from clinicians is not whether the model is accurate, but whether the model can express to a human operator when it does not know if its answer is correct. We propose to use Monte Carlo dropout (MCDO) and the bootstrap aggregation (bagging) technique on deep learning models to produce uncertainty estimations for radiation therapy dose prediction. We show that both models are capable of generating a reasonable uncertainty map, and, with our proposed scaling technique, creating interpretable uncertainties and bounds on the prediction and any relevant metrics. Performance-wise, bagging provides statistically significant reduced loss value and errors in most of the metrics investigated in this study. The addition of bagging was able to further reduce errors by another 0.34% for Dmean and 0.19% for Dmax, on average, when compared to the baseline framework. Overall, the bagging framework provided significantly lower MAE of 2.62, as opposed to the baseline framework's MAE of 2.87. The usefulness of bagging, from solely a performance standpoint, does highly depend on the problem and the acceptable predictive error, and its high upfront computational cost during training should be factored in to deciding whether it is advantageous to use it. In terms of deployment with uncertainty estimations turned on, both frameworks offer the same performance time of about 12 seconds. As an ensemble-based metaheuristic, bagging can be used with existing machine learning architectures to improve stability and performance, and MCDO can be applied to any deep learning models that have dropout as part of their architecture.