No Arabic abstract
Unsupervised domain adaptation is useful in medical image segmentation. Particularly, when ground truths of the target images are not available, domain adaptation can train a target-specific model by utilizing the existing labeled images from other modalities. Most of the reported works mapped images of both the source and target domains into a common latent feature space, and then reduced their discrepancy either implicitly with adversarial training or explicitly by directly minimizing a discrepancy metric. In this work, we propose a new framework, where the latent features of both domains are driven towards a common and parameterized variational form, whose conditional distribution given the image is Gaussian. This is achieved by two networks based on variational auto-encoders (VAEs) and a regularization for this variational approximation. Both of the VAEs, each for one domain, contain a segmentation module, where the source segmentation is trained in a supervised manner, while the target one is trained unsupervisedly. We validated the proposed domain adaptation method using two cardiac segmentation tasks, i.e., the cross-modality (CT and MR) whole heart segmentation and the cross-sequence cardiac MR segmentation. Results show that the proposed method achieved better accuracies compared to two state-of-the-art approaches and demonstrated good potential for cardiac segmentation. Furthermore, the proposed explicit regularization was shown to be effective and efficient in narrowing down the distribution gap between domains, which is useful for unsupervised domain adaptation. Our code and data has been released via https://zmiclab.github.io/projects.html.
Automatic and accurate segmentation of the ventricles and myocardium from multi-sequence cardiac MRI (CMR) is crucial for the diagnosis and treatment management for patients suffering from myocardial infarction (MI). However, due to the existence of domain shift among different modalities of datasets, the performance of deep neural networks drops significantly when the training and testing datasets are distinct. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised domain alignment method to explicitly alleviate the domain shifts among different modalities of CMR sequences, emph{e.g.,} bSSFP, LGE, and T2-weighted. Our segmentation network is attention U-Net with pyramid pooling module, where multi-level feature space and output space adversarial learning are proposed to transfer discriminative domain knowledge across different datasets. Moreover, we further introduce a group-wise feature recalibration module to enforce the fine-grained semantic-level feature alignment that matching features from different networks but with the same class label. We evaluate our method on the multi-sequence cardiac MR Segmentation Challenge 2019 datasets, which contain three different modalities of MRI sequences. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed methods can obtain significant segmentation improvements compared with the baseline models.
Left ventricle segmentation and morphological assessment are essential for improving diagnosis and our understanding of cardiomyopathy, which in turn is imperative for reducing risk of myocardial infarctions in patients. Convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods for cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) image segmentation rely on supervision with pixel-level annotations, and may not generalize well to images from a different domain. These methods are typically sensitive to variations in imaging protocols and data acquisition. Since annotating multi-sequence CMR images is tedious and subject to inter- and intra-observer variations, developing methods that can automatically adapt from one domain to the target domain is of great interest. In this paper, we propose an approach for domain adaptation in multi-sequence CMR segmentation task using transfer learning that combines multi-source image information. We first train an encoder-decoder CNN on T2-weighted and balanced-Steady State Free Precession (bSSFP) MR images with pixel-level annotation and fine-tune the same network with a limited number of Late Gadolinium Enhanced-MR (LGE-MR) subjects, to adapt the domain features. The domain-adapted network was trained with just four LGE-MR training samples and obtained an average Dice score of $sim$85.0% on the test set comprises of 40 LGE-MR subjects. The proposed method significantly outperformed a network without adaptation trained from scratch on the same set of LGE-MR training data.
Deep learning models trained on medical images from a source domain (e.g. imaging modality) often fail when deployed on images from a different target domain, despite imaging common anatomical structures. Deep unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to improve the performance of a deep neural network model on a target domain, using solely unlabelled target domain data and labelled source domain data. However, current state-of-the-art methods exhibit reduced performance when target data is scarce. In this work, we introduce a new data efficient UDA method for multi-domain medical image segmentation. The proposed method combines a novel VAE-based feature prior matching, which is data-efficient, and domain adversarial training to learn a shared domain-invariant latent space which is exploited during segmentation. Our method is evaluated on a public multi-modality cardiac image segmentation dataset by adapting from the labelled source domain (3D MRI) to the unlabelled target domain (3D CT). We show that by using only one single unlabelled 3D CT scan, the proposed architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art in the same setting. Finally, we perform ablation studies on prior matching and domain adversarial training to shed light on the theoretical grounding of the proposed method.
Retinal vessel segmentation plays a key role in computer-aided screening, diagnosis, and treatment of various cardiovascular and ophthalmic diseases. Recently, deep learning-based retinal vessel segmentation algorithms have achieved remarkable performance. However, due to the domain shift problem, the performance of these algorithms often degrades when they are applied to new data that is different from the training data. Manually labeling new data for each test domain is often a time-consuming and laborious task. In this work, we explore unsupervised domain adaptation in retinal vessel segmentation by using entropy-based adversarial learning and transfer normalization layer to train a segmentation network, which generalizes well across domains and requires no annotation of the target domain. Specifically, first, an entropy-based adversarial learning strategy is developed to reduce the distribution discrepancy between the source and target domains while also achieving the objective of entropy minimization on the target domain. In addition, a new transfer normalization layer is proposed to further boost the transferability of the deep network. It normalizes the features of each domain separately to compensate for the domain distribution gap. Besides, it also adaptively selects those feature channels that are more transferable between domains, thus further enhancing the generalization performance of the network. We conducted extensive experiments on three regular fundus image datasets and an ultra-widefield fundus image dataset, and the results show that our approach yields significant performance gains compared to other state-of-the-art methods.
Robust cardiac image segmentation is still an open challenge due to the inability of the existing methods to achieve satisfactory performance on unseen data of different domains. Since the acquisition and annotation of medical data are costly and time-consuming, recent work focuses on domain adaptation and generalization to bridge the gap between data from different populations and scanners. In this paper, we propose two data augmentation methods that focus on improving the domain adaptation and generalization abilities of state-to-the-art cardiac segmentation models. In particular, our Resolution Augmentation method generates more diverse data by rescaling images to different resolutions within a range spanning different scanner protocols. Subsequently, our Factor-based Augmentation method generates more diverse data by projecting the original samples onto disentangled latent spaces, and combining the learned anatomy and modality factors from different domains. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the importance of efficient adaptation between seen and unseen domains, as well as model generalization ability, to robust cardiac image segmentation.