# Improving Medical Image Classification with Label Noise Using Dual-uncertainty Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.00528 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00528/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02315/) (2017)
- [Universal adversarial perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08401/) (2016)
- [DivideMix: Learning with Noisy Labels as Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07394/) (2020)
- [Learning to Reweight Examples for Robust Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09050/) (2018)
- [MentorNet: Learning Data-Driven Curriculum for Very Deep Neural Networks on Corrupted Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05055/) (2017)
- [Learning from Noisy Labels with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08199/) (2020)
- [Symmetric Cross Entropy for Robust Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06112/) (2019)
- [Regularizing Neural Networks by Penalizing Confident Output Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06548/) (2017)
- [Robust Loss Functions under Label Noise for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09482/) (2017)
- [Deep learning with noisy labels: exploring techniques and remedies in medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02911/) (2019)
- [Dual T: Reducing Estimation Error for Transition Matrix in Label-noise Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07805/) (2020)
- [Learning From Noisy Labels By Regularized Estimation Of Annotator Confusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03680/) (2019)
- [CurriculumNet: Weakly Supervised Learning from Large-Scale Web Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01097/) (2018)
- [Curriculum Loss: Robust Learning and Generalization against Label Corruption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10045/) (2019)
- [Direct Uncertainty Prediction for Medical Second Opinions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01771/) (2018)
- [Asymmetric Co-Teaching for Unsupervised Cross Domain Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01349/) (2019)
- [Robust Learning at Noisy Labeled Medical Images: Applied to Skin Lesion Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07759/) (2019)
- [IMAE for Noise-Robust Learning: Mean Absolute Error Does Not Treat Examples Equally and Gradient Magnitude's Variance Matters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12141/) (2019)
- [Quantifying and Leveraging Classification Uncertainty for Chest Radiograph Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07775/) (2019)
- [Interpreting chest X-rays via CNNs that exploit hierarchical disease dependencies and uncertainty labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06475/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning of Small Sample in Biomedical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00473/) (2019)
- [Transfer Learning with Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09724/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Relational Subsets Knowledge Distillation for Long-tailed Retinal Diseases Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11057/) (2021)
- [Interpretability-Driven Sample Selection Using Self Supervised Learning For Disease Classification And Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06087/) (2021)
- [CT Image Synthesis Using Weakly Supervised Segmentation and Geometric Inter-Label Relations For COVID Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10230/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Fundus Image Segmentation with Category-level Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03684/) (2022)
- [Learning of Inter-Label Geometric Relationships Using Self-Supervised Learning: Application To Gleason Grade Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00404/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Using Feature Disentanglement And GCNs For Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13123/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Generalized Zero Shot Learning for Gleason Grading using Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07646/) (2021)
- [On the Ramifications of Human Label Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05871/) (2022)
- [Interpretable Saliency Maps And Self-Supervised Learning For Generalized Zero Shot Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01728/) (2022)
- [Improved Super Resolution of MR Images Using CNNs and Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11748/) (2022)
- [Synthetic Generation and Latent Projection Denoising of Rim Lesions in Multiple Sclerosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23353/) (2025)
- [Cyclic Generative Adversarial Networks With Congruent Image-Report Generation For Explainable Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08424/) (2022)
- [Establishment of Neural Networks Robust to Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15279/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep neural networks are known to be data-driven and label noise can have a marked impact on model performance. Recent studies have shown great robustness to classic image recognition even under a high noisy rate. In medical applications, learning from datasets with label noise is more challenging since medical imaging datasets tend to have asymmetric (class-dependent) noise and suffer from high observer variability. In this paper, we systematically discuss and define the two common types of label noise in medical images - disagreement label noise from inconsistency expert opinions and single-target label noise from wrong diagnosis record. We then propose an uncertainty estimation-based framework to handle these two label noise amid the medical image classification task. We design a dual-uncertainty estimation approach to measure the disagreement label noise and single-target label noise via Direct Uncertainty Prediction and Monte-Carlo-Dropout. A boosting-based curriculum training procedure is later introduced for robust learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by conducting extensive experiments on three different diseases: skin lesions, prostate cancer, and retinal diseases. We also release a large re-engineered database that consists of annotations from more than ten ophthalmologists with an unbiased golden standard dataset for evaluation and benchmarking.