# Tversky loss function for image segmentation using 3D fully convolutional deep networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.05721 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05721/

## Key facts

- Cited by 228 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 228)

- [Unified Focal loss: Generalising Dice and cross entropy-based losses to handle class imbalanced medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04525/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning Enables Big Data for Rare Cancer Boundary Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10836/) (2022)
- [Trustworthy clinical AI solutions: a unified review of uncertainty quantification in deep learning models for medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03736/) (2022)
- [NeoUNet: Towards accurate colon polyp segmentation and neoplasm detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05023/) (2021)
- [Understanding Imbalanced Semantic Segmentation Through Neural Collapse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01100/) (2023)
- [Loss Functions in the Era of Semantic Segmentation: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05391/) (2023)
- [HybridNets: End-to-End Perception Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09035/) (2022)
- [Are we using appropriate segmentation metrics? Identifying correlates of human expert perception for CNN training beyond rolling the DICE coefficient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06205/) (2021)
- [Focus U-Net: A novel dual attention-gated CNN for polyp segmentation during colonoscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07467/) (2021)
- [Striking the Right Balance: Recall Loss for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14917/) (2021)
- [Active Learning for Deep Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13259/) (2021)
- [blob loss: instance imbalance aware loss functions for semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08209/) (2022)
- [Calibrating the Dice loss to handle neural network overconfidence for biomedical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00528/) (2021)
- [Medical Image Segmentation with 3D Convolutional Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08467/) (2021)
- [Coarse-to-fine Animal Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08176/) (2021)
- [You Only Look at Once for Real-time and Generic Multi-Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01641/) (2023)
- [FedA3I: Annotation Quality-Aware Aggregation for Federated Medical Image Segmentation against Heterogeneous Annotation Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12838/) (2023)
- [SegmentAnyBone: A Universal Model that Segments Any Bone at Any Location on MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12974/) (2024)
- [Deep Rib Fracture Instance Segmentation and Classification from CT on the RibFrac Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09372/) (2024)
- [A Generalized Surface Loss for Reducing the Hausdorff Distance in Medical Imaging Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03868/) (2023)
- [M2SNet: Multi-scale in Multi-scale Subtraction Network for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10894/) (2023)
- [TwinLiteNet: An Efficient and Lightweight Model for Driveable Area and Lane Segmentation in Self-Driving Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10705/) (2023)
- [Boundary Difference Over Union Loss For Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00220/) (2023)
- [Do We Really Need Dice? The Hidden Region-Size Biases of Segmentation Losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08717/) (2021)
- [Jaccard Metric Losses: Optimizing the Jaccard Index with Soft Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05666/) (2023)
- [FAST-AID Brain: Fast and Accurate Segmentation Tool using Artificial Intelligence Developed for Brain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14360/) (2022)
- [A Semantic Segmentation Network for Urban-Scale Building Footprint Extraction Using RGB Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01263/) (2021)
- [Verification of Size Invariance in DNN Activations using Concept Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06727/) (2021)
- [Enhancing Boundary Segmentation for Topological Accuracy with Skeleton-based Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18539/) (2024)
- [TATL: Task Agnostic Transfer Learning for Skin Attributes Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01641/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fully convolutional deep neural networks carry out excellent potential for fast and accurate image segmentation. One of the main challenges in training these networks is data imbalance, which is particularly problematic in medical imaging applications such as lesion segmentation where the number of lesion voxels is often much lower than the number of non-lesion voxels. Training with unbalanced data can lead to predictions that are severely biased towards high precision but low recall (sensitivity), which is undesired especially in medical applications where false negatives are much less tolerable than false positives. Several methods have been proposed to deal with this problem including balanced sampling, two step training, sample re-weighting, and similarity loss functions. In this paper, we propose a generalized loss function based on the Tversky index to address the issue of data imbalance and achieve much better trade-off between precision and recall in training 3D fully convolutional deep neural networks. Experimental results in multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation on magnetic resonance images show improved F2 score, Dice coefficient, and the area under the precision-recall curve in test data. Based on these results we suggest Tversky loss function as a generalized framework to effectively train deep neural networks.