Tyche: Stochastic In-Context Learning for Medical Image Segmentation

Marianne Rakic, Hallee E. Wong, Jose Javier Gonzalez Ortiz, Beth A. Cimini, John V. Guttag, Adrian V. Dalca; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 11159-11173

Existing learning-based solutions to medical image segmentation have two important shortcomings. First for most new segmentation tasks a new model has to be trained or fine-tuned. This requires extensive resources and machine-learning expertise and is therefore often infeasible for medical researchers and clinicians. Second most existing segmentation methods produce a single deterministic segmentation mask for a given image. In practice however there is often considerable uncertainty about what constitutes the correct segmentation and different expert annotators will often segment the same image differently. We tackle both of these problems with Tyche a framework that uses a context set to generate stochastic predictions for previously unseen tasks without the need to retrain. Tyche differs from other in-context segmentation methods in two important ways. (1) We introduce a novel convolution block architecture that enables interactions among predictions. (2) We introduce in-context test-time augmentation a new mechanism to provide prediction stochasticity. When combined with appropriate model design and loss functions Tyche can predict a set of plausible diverse segmentation candidates for new or unseen medical images and segmentation tasks without the need to retrain. Code available at: https://tyche.csail.mit.edu/.