Multi-granularity prior networks for uncertainty-informed patient-specific quality assurance

Deep Learning Automated Patient-Specific Quality Assurance (PSQA) aims to reduce clinical resource requirements. It is vital to ensure the safety and effectiveness of radiation therapy by predicting the dose difference metric (Gamma passing rate) and its distribution. However, current research overlooks uncertainty quantification in model predictions, limiting their trustworthiness in real clinical environments. This paper proposes a Multi-granularity Uncertainty Quantification (MGUQ) framework. A Bayesian framework that quantifies uncertainties at multiple granularities for multi-task PSQA, specifically Gamma Passing Rate (GPR) prediction and Dose Difference Prediction (DDP), integrates visualization-based interactive components. Using Bayesian theory, we derive a comprehensive multi-granularity loss function that comprises granularity-specific loss and coherence loss components. Additionally, we proposed Multi-granularity Prior Networks, a dual-stream network architecture, to infer the distributions of DDP (modeled as t-distributions) and GPR (modeled as Gaussian distributions) under specific statistical assumptions. Comprehensive evaluations are conducted on a dataset from ‘‘Peeking Union Medical College Hospital’’, and results show that our proposed method achieves a minimum MAE loss of 0.864 with a 2%/3 mm criterion and realizes the uncertainty visualization of dose difference. Further, it also achieves 100% Clinical Accuracy (CA) with a workload of 67.2%. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework can enhance the trustworthiness of deep learning applications in PSQA.