Robust T-Loss for medical image segmentation

Abstract

This work introduces T-Loss, a novel and robust loss function for medical image segmentation. T-Loss is derived from the negative log-likelihood of the Student-t distribution and excels at handling noisy masks by dynamically controlling its sensitivity through a single parameter. This parameter is optimized during the backpropagation process, obviating the need for additional computations or prior knowledge about the extent and distribution of noisy labels. We provide in-depth analysis of this parameter behavior during training and revealing its adaptive nature and its role in preventing noisy memorization. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that T-Loss significantly outperforms traditional loss functions in terms of dice scores on two public medical datasets, specifically for skin lesion and lung segmentation. Moreover, T-Loss exhibits remarkable resilience to various types of simulated label noise, which mimics human annotation errors. Our results provide strong evidence that T-Loss is a promising alternative for medical image segmentation where high levels of noise or outliers in the dataset are a typical phenomenon in practice. The project website, including code and additional resources, can be found at: https://robust-tloss.github.io/.