Disentangling Human Error from Ground Truth in Segmentation of Medical Images

Recent years have seen increasing use of supervised learning methods for segmentation tasks. However, the predictive performance of these algorithms depends on the quality of labels. This problem is particularly pertinent in the medical image domain, where both the annotation cost and inter-observer variability are high. In a typical label acquisition process, different human experts provide their estimates of the ``true'' segmentation labels under the influence of their own biases and competence levels. Treating these noisy labels blindly as the ground truth limits the performance that automatic segmentation algorithms can achieve.