Detecting Out-of-Distribution via an Unsupervised Uncertainty Estimation for Prostate Cancer Diagnosis

Artificial intelligence-based prostate cancer (PCa) detection models have been widely explored to assist clinical diagnosis. However, these trained models may generate erroneous results specifically on datasets that are not within training distribution. In this paper, we propose an approach to tackle this so-called out-of-distribution (OOD) data problem. Specifically, we devise an end-to-end unsupervised framework to estimate uncertainty values for cases analyzed by a previously trained PCa detection model. Our PCa detection model takes the inputs of bpMRI scans and through our proposed approach we identify OOD cases that are likely to generate degraded performance due to the data distribution shifts. The proposed OOD framework consists of two parts. First, an autoencoder-based reconstruction network is proposed, which learns discrete latent representations of in-distribution data. Second, the uncertainty is computed using perceptual loss that measures the distance between original and reconstructed images in the feature space of a pre-trained PCa detection network. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is evaluated on seven independent data collections with a total of 1,432 cases. The performance of pre-trained PCa detection model is significantly improved by excluding cases with high uncertainty.