mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

A Review of Uncertainty Estimation and its Application in Medical Imaging

arXiv 2302.08119 ↗First posted 16 Feb 2023eess.IV cs.CVcited by 59

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

The use of AI systems in healthcare for the early screening of diseases is of great clinical importance. Deep learning has shown great promise in medical imaging, but the reliability and trustworthiness of AI systems limit their deployment in real clinical scenes, where patient safety is at stake. Uncertainty estimation plays a pivotal role in producing a confidence evaluation along with the prediction of the deep model. This is particularly important in medical imaging, where the uncertainty in the model's predictions can be used to identify areas of concern or to provide additional information to the clinician. In this paper, we review the various types of uncertainty in deep learning, including aleatoric uncertainty and epistemic uncertainty. We further discuss how they can be estimated in medical imaging. More importantly, we review recent advances in deep learning models that incorporate uncertainty estimation in medical imaging. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future directions in uncertainty estimation in deep learning for medical imaging. We hope this review will ignite further interest in the community and provide researchers with an up-to-date reference regarding applications of uncertainty estimation models in medical imaging.

Key facts. Cited by 59 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 84 of its 149 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Feb 2023.

Builds on

84 of 149 references.

References · 84

  1. 2017Neural Discrete Representation Learningcited by 4,650
  2. 2015Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learningcited by 4,416
  3. 2016Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensemblescited by 3,888
  4. 2017What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?cited by 2,335
  5. 2019CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparisoncited by 1,410
  6. 2019Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2cited by 1,376
  7. 2020A Review of Uncertainty Quantification in Deep Learning: Techniques, Applications and Challengescited by 813
  8. 2018Evidential Deep Learning to Quantify Classification Uncertaintycited by 728
  9. 2019Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection 2018: A Challenge Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)cited by 657
  10. 2019A Simple Baseline for Bayesian Uncertainty in Deep Learningcited by 555
  11. 2017Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection: A Challenge at the 2017 International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)cited by 549
  12. 2015Variational Dropout and the Local Reparameterization Trickcited by 489
38 more
  1. 2018fastMRI: An Open Dataset and Benchmarks for Accelerated MRIcited by 464
  2. 2020Simple and Principled Uncertainty Estimation with Deterministic Deep Learning via Distance Awarenesscited by 389
  3. 2019Uncertainty-aware Self-ensembling Model for Semi-supervised 3D Left Atrium Segmentationcited by 378
  4. 2019Deep Evidential Regressioncited by 354
  5. 2018A Probabilistic U-Net for Segmentation of Ambiguous Imagescited by 281
  6. 2018Aleatoric uncertainty estimation with test-time augmentation for medical image segmentation with convolutional neural networkscited by 278
  7. 2022Transformers in Medical Imaging: A Surveycited by 245
  8. 2019Deep Learning for Segmentation using an Open Large-Scale Dataset in 2D Echocardiographycited by 243
  9. 2020Pitfalls of In-Domain Uncertainty Estimation and Ensembling in Deep Learningcited by 208
  10. 2021Trustworthy AI: From Principles to Practicescited by 206
  11. 2016Validation, comparison, and combination of algorithms for automatic detection of pulmonary nodules in computed tomography images: the LUNA16 challengecited by 198
  12. 2022Trusted Multi-View Classification with Dynamic Evidential Fusioncited by 167
  13. 2019Confidence Calibration and Predictive Uncertainty Estimation for Deep Medical Image Segmentationcited by 162
  14. 2015Bayesian Convolutional Neural Networks with Bernoulli Approximate Variational Inferencecited by 159
  15. 2015DeepOrgan: Multi-level Deep Convolutional Networks for Automated Pancreas Segmentationcited by 158
  16. 2018Exploring Uncertainty Measures in Deep Networks for Multiple Sclerosis Lesion Detection and Segmentationcited by 146
  17. 2017Morphable Face Models - An Open Frameworkcited by 138
  18. 2019PHiSeg: Capturing Uncertainty in Medical Image Segmentationcited by 128
  19. 2019Standardized Assessment of Automatic Segmentation of White Matter Hyperintensities and Results of the WMH Segmentation Challengecited by 115
  20. 2021Trusted Multi-View Classificationcited by 94
  21. 2021Applications of Deep Learning in Fundus Images: A Reviewcited by 59
  22. 2020Interpreting Chest X-rays via CNNs that Exploit Hierarchical Disease Dependencies and Uncertainty Labelscited by 56
  23. 2019Reducing Uncertainty in Undersampled MRI Reconstruction with Active Acquisitioncited by 55
  24. 2021Trustworthy Long-Tailed Classificationcited by 51
  25. 2019Uncertainty Quantification in Deep MRI Reconstructioncited by 49
  26. 2018On the Effect of Inter-observer Variability for a Reliable Estimation of Uncertainty of Medical Image Segmentationcited by 46
  27. 2018Leveraging Uncertainty Estimates for Predicting Segmentation Qualitycited by 44
  28. 2019Supervised Uncertainty Quantification for Segmentation with Multiple Annotationscited by 42
  29. 2019Exploiting Epistemic Uncertainty of Anatomy Segmentation for Anomaly Detection in Retinal OCTcited by 41
  30. 2021Trustworthy Multimodal Regression with Mixture of Normal-inverse Gamma Distributionscited by 39
  31. 2022Uncertainty-Informed Deep Learning Models Enable High-Confidence Predictions for Digital Histopathologycited by 37
  32. 2017On the Compactness, Efficiency, and Representation of 3D Convolutional Networks: Brain Parcellation as a Pretext Taskcited by 36
  33. 2021Bayesian Uncertainty Estimation of Learned Variational MRI Reconstructioncited by 30
  34. 2022TBraTS: Trusted Brain Tumor Segmentationcited by 30
  35. 2017Bayesian Image Quality Transfer with CNNs: Exploring Uncertainty in dMRI Super-Resolutioncited by 29
  36. 2019Deep Weakly-Supervised Learning Methods for Classification and Localization in Histology Images: A Surveycited by 28
  37. 2020Quantifying and Leveraging Predictive Uncertainty for Medical Image Assessmentcited by 26
  38. 2020Deep Interpretable Classification and Weakly-Supervised Segmentation of Histology Images via Max-Min Uncertaintycited by 26

50 most cited of 84 All 84 (JSON)

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 12; 2024: 18; 2025: 15; 2026: 14.

59 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2024MedCLIP-SAMv2: Towards Universal Text-Driven Medical Image Segmentationcited by 37
  2. 2024Out-of-distribution Detection in Medical Image Analysis: A surveycited by 22
  3. 2023Uncertainty-inspired Open Set Learning for Retinal Anomaly Identificationcited by 18
  4. 2023URL: A Representation Learning Benchmark for Transferable Uncertainty Estimatescited by 17
  5. 2023How to Fix a Broken Confidence Estimator: Evaluating Post-hoc Methods for Selective Classification with Deep Neural Networkscited by 15
  6. 2023ChatRadio-Valuer: A Chat Large Language Model for Generalizable Radiology Report Generation Based on Multi-institution and Multi-system Datacited by 14
  7. 2025Uncertainty Quantification for Machine Learning in Healthcare: A Surveycited by 11
  8. 2023Enhancing the Reliability of Segment Anything Model for Auto-Prompting Medical Image Segmentation with Uncertainty Rectificationcited by 8
  9. 2023Structural-Based Uncertainty in Deep Learning Across Anatomical Scales: Analysis in White Matter Lesion Segmentationcited by 7
  10. 2023Informative Priors Improve the Reliability of Multimodal Clinical Data Classificationcited by 6
  11. 2024CONFINE: Conformal Prediction for Interpretable Neural Networkscited by 5
  12. 2024MedUHIP: Towards Human-In-the-Loop Medical Segmentationcited by 5
38 more
  1. 2025UniVRSE: Unified Vision-conditioned Response Semantic Entropy for Hallucination Detection in Medical Vision-Language Modelscited by 5
  2. 2025Learning Disentangled Stain and Structural Representations for Semi-Supervised Histopathology Segmentationcited by 4
  3. 2024A Collaborative Content Moderation Framework for Toxicity Detection based on Conformalized Estimates of Annotation Disagreementcited by 3
  4. 2023Probabilistic Safety Regions Via Finite Families of Scalable Classifierscited by 2
  5. 2023Uncertainty Estimation in Contrast-Enhanced MR Image Translation with Multi-Axis Fusioncited by 2
  6. 2024EDUE: Expert Disagreement-Guided One-Pass Uncertainty Estimation for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 2
  7. 2024Deep Evidential Learning for Radiotherapy Dose Predictioncited by 2
  8. 2025Efficient dataset construction using active learning and uncertainty-aware neural networks for plasma turbulent transport surrogate modelscited by 2
  9. 2025Hallucination Filtering in Radiology Vision-Language Models Using Discrete Semantic Entropycited by 2
  10. 2025CheXmask-U: Quantifying uncertainty in landmark-based anatomical segmentation for X-ray imagescited by 2
  11. 2026Uncertainty in a Single Pass: A Closed-Form Identity for One-Step Flow Matchingcited by 2
  12. 2023Can Physician Judgment Enhance Model Trustworthiness? A Case Study on Predicting Pathological Lymph Nodes in Rectal Cancercited by 1
  13. 2024Mask-TS Net: Mask Temperature Scaling Uncertainty Calibration for Polyp Segmentationcited by 1
  14. 2024Improving Deep Learning Model Calibration for Cardiac Applications using Deterministic Uncertainty Networks and Uncertainty-aware Trainingcited by 1
  15. 2024Uncertainty modeling for fine-tuned implicit functionscited by 1
  16. 2024Towards Integrating Epistemic Uncertainty Estimation into the Radiotherapy Workflowcited by 1
  17. 2024SPA: Efficient User-Preference Alignment against Uncertainty in Medical Image Segmentationcited by 1
  18. 2025Last Layer Hamiltonian Monte Carlocited by 1
  19. 2025Automated C-Arm Positioning via Conformal Landmark Localizationcited by 1
  20. 2026MUMINS: Metadata-conditioned Uncertainty-aware Medical Image Next-state Synthesiscited by 1
  21. 2023Quantifying predictive uncertainty of aphasia severity in stroke patients with sparse heteroscedastic Bayesian high-dimensional regressioncited by 0
  22. 2023SQA-SAM: Segmentation Quality Assessment for Medical Images Utilizing the Segment Anything Modelcited by 0
  23. 2024Hardware-Aware Neural Dropout Search for Reliable Uncertainty Prediction on FPGAcited by 0
  24. 2024Enhancing Diagnostic Reliability of Foundation Model with Uncertainty Estimation in OCT Imagescited by 0
  25. 2024Deep Bayesian segmentation for colon polyps: Well-calibrated predictions in medical imagingcited by 0
  26. 2024DDEvENet: Evidence-based Ensemble Learning for Uncertainty-aware Brain Parcellation Using Diffusion MRIcited by 0
  27. 2024Uncertainty-Error correlations in Evidential Deep Learning models for biomedical segmentationcited by 0
  28. 2024Uncertainty quantification for White Matter Hyperintensity segmentation detects silent failures and improves automated Fazekas quantificationcited by 0
  29. 2025Deep Learning for Ophthalmology: The State-of-the-Art and Future Trendscited by 0
  30. 2025A method for classification of data with uncertainty using hypothesis testingcited by 0
  31. 2025L-FUSION: Laplacian Fetal Ultrasound Segmentation & Uncertainty Estimationcited by 0
  32. 2025Explaining Uncertainty in Multiple Sclerosis Cortical Lesion Segmentation Beyond Prediction Errorscited by 0
  33. 2025Label Uncertainty for Ultrasound Segmentationcited by 0
  34. 2025Influence of Classification Task and Distribution Shift Type on OOD Detection in Fetal Ultrasoundcited by 0
  35. 2025UbiQVision: Quantifying Uncertainty in XAI for Image Recognitioncited by 0
  36. 2026Towards Reliable Medical LLMs: Benchmarking and Enhancing Confidence Estimation of Large Language Models in Medical Consultationcited by 0
  37. 2026Robust Uncertainty Estimation under Distribution Shift via Difference Reconstructioncited by 0
  38. 2026Pareto-Guided Optimization for Uncertainty-Aware Medical Image Segmentationcited by 0

50 most cited of 59 All 59 (JSON)