# We Care Each Pixel: Calibrating on Medical Segmentation Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05107 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05107/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [The Medical Segmentation Decathlon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05735/) (2021)
- [Identifying the Best Machine Learning Algorithms for Brain Tumor Segmentation, Progression Assessment, and Overall Survival Prediction in the BRATS Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02629/) (2018)
- [Regularizing Neural Networks by Penalizing Confident Output Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06548/) (2017)
- [Calibrating Deep Neural Networks using Focal Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09437/) (2020)
- [Verified Uncertainty Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10155/) (2019)
- [Medical Image Analysis using Convolutional Neural Networks: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02250/) (2017)
- [The Devil is in the Margin: Margin-based Label Smoothing for Network Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15430/) (2021)
- [Unified Focal loss: Generalising Dice and cross entropy-based losses to handle class imbalanced medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04525/) (2021)
- [Meta-Cal: Well-controlled Post-hoc Calibration by Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04290/) (2021)
- [Spatially Varying Label Smoothing: Capturing Uncertainty from Expert Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05788/) (2021)
- [Boundary-aware Context Neural Network for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00966/) (2020)
- [Calibrating the Dice loss to handle neural network overconfidence for biomedical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00528/) (2021)
- [Trust your neighbours: Penalty-based constraints for model calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06268/) (2023)
- [Neighbor-Aware Calibration of Segmentation Networks with Penalty-Based Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14487/) (2024)
- [Focal Calibration Loss: Controlling Posterior Distortion in Deep Neural Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18321/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Explainable Flood Segmentation on Sentinel-1 SAR1 Imagery Using CNN and Transformer Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16302/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Post-Hoc Calibration in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01902/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Medical image segmentation is fundamental for computer-aided diagnostics, providing accurate delineation of anatomical structures and pathological regions. While common metrics such as Accuracy, DSC, IoU, and HD primarily quantify spatial agreement between predictions and ground-truth labels, they do not assess the calibration quality of segmentation models, which is crucial for clinical reliability. To address this limitation, we propose pixel-wise Expected Calibration Error (pECE), a novel metric that explicitly measures miscalibration at the pixel level, thereby ensuring both spatial precision and confidence reliability. We further introduce a morphological adaptation strategy that applies morphological operations to ground-truth masks before computing calibration losses, particularly benefiting margin-based losses such as Margin SVLS and NACL. Additionally, we present the Signed Distance Calibration Loss (SDC), which aligns boundary geometry with calibration objectives by penalizing discrepancies between predicted and ground-truth signed distance functions (SDFs). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only enhances segmentation performance but also improves calibration quality, yielding more trustworthy confidence estimates. Code is available at: https://github.com/EagleAdelaide/SDC-Loss.