Evaluating White Matter Lesion Segmentations with Refined Sørensen-Dice Analysis

Sci Rep. 2020 May 19;10(1):8242. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-64803-w.

Abstract

The Sørensen-Dice index (SDI) is a widely used measure for evaluating medical image segmentation algorithms. It offers a standardized measure of segmentation accuracy which has proven useful. However, it offers diminishing insight when the number of objects is unknown, such as in white matter lesion segmentation of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. We present a refinement for finer grained parsing of SDI results in situations where the number of objects is unknown. We explore these ideas with two case studies showing what can be learned from our two presented studies. Our first study explores an inter-rater comparison, showing that smaller lesions cannot be reliably identified. In our second case study, we demonstrate fusing multiple MS lesion segmentation algorithms based on the insights into the algorithms provided by our analysis to generate a segmentation that exhibits improved performance. This work demonstrates the wealth of information that can be learned from refined analysis of medical image segmentations.

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study
  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Algorithms
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Multiple Sclerosis / diagnostic imaging*
  • White Matter / diagnostic imaging*