Uncertainty-aware membranous nephropathy classification: A Monte-Carlo dropout approach to detect how certain is the model

Abstract

Membranous nephropathy (MN) is among the most common glomerular diseases that cause nephrotic syndrome in adults. To aid pathologists on performing the MN classification task, we proposed here a pipeline consisted of two steps. Firstly, we assessed four deep-learning-based architectures, namely, ResNet-18, MobileNet, DenseNet, and Wide-ResNet. To achieve more reliable predictions, we adopted and extensively evaluated a Monte-Carlo dropout approach for uncertainty estimation. Using a 10-fold cross-validation setup, all models achieved average F1-scores above 92%, where the highest average value of 93.2% was obtained by using Wide-ResNet. Regarding uncertainty estimation with Wide-ResNet, high uncertainty scores were more associated with erroneous predictions, demonstrating that our approach can assist pathologists in interpreting the predictions with high reliability. We show that uncertainty-based thresholds for decision referral can greatly improve classification performance, increasing the accuracy up to 96%. Finally, we investigated how the uncertainty scores relate to complexity scores defined by pathologists.

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