A Decision-Aware Evaluation Protocol for Uncertainty in Medical Image Segmentation

Saket Maganti, Shreyank N Gowda

Medical segmentation uncertainty is often evaluated with calibration error or pixel-level error-detection scores, but these metrics do not show whether uncertainty improves downstream review decisions. We propose a decision-aware evaluation protocol that separates uncertainty estimation from deferral policy and evaluates their combination under fixed review budgets: which pixels, regions, or images should be accepted, and which should be reviewed. The protocol reports fixed-budget error reduction, risk-coverage behaviour, region-level review proxies, structural failure modes, probability-derived baselines, and sensitivity to review assumptions. We instantiate it across retinal vessel, skin lesion, and polyp segmentation with multiple backbones and uncertainty estimators. Under matched inference budgets and canonical multi-layer MC Dropout, test-time augmentation (TTA) gives a stronger error-detection signal across matched MC--TTA comparisons, including architecture and dropout-placement checks. However, estimator rankings are not universal. For example, probability-derived scores remain competitive, deep ensembles can outperform TTA, learned deferral helps mainly when the base…