Combining Multiple Ground Truth Annotations for Segmentation Training for Oral Cavity Cancer

Annotation of true ground truth is a difficult task for many computational pathology problems. Types of ground truth labels in the field include bounding boxes, text labels, binary class labels, and full tissue maps. The compounding issue is when multiple different pathologists label the same image, and there is disagreement between them. In this work, we investigate multiply reannotated tumor maps for squamous cell carcinoma, and if different annotation fusion methods have an impact on tumor segmentation. We find in this work that tumor label maps with an average annotation similarity of 0.759, do not have a significant quantitative difference in tumor segmentation.