Recent works have correlated Masked Image Modeling (MIM) with consistency regularization in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA). However, they merely treat masking as a special form of deformation on the input images and neglect the theoretical analysis, which leads to a superficial understanding of masked reconstruction and insufficient exploitation of its potential in enhancing feature extraction and representation learning. In this paper, we reframe masked reconstruction as a sparse signal reconstruction problem and theoretically prove that the dual form of complementary masks possesses superior capabilities in extracting domain-agnostic image features. Based on this compelling insight, we propose MaskTwins, a simple yet effective UDA framework that integrates masked reconstruction directly into the main training pipeline. MaskTwins uncovers intrinsic structural patterns that persist across disparate domains by enforcing consistency between predictions of images masked in complementary ways, enabling domain generalization in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of MaskTwins over baseline methods in natural and biological image segmentation. These results demonstrate the significant advantages of MaskTwins in extracting domain-invariant features without the need for separate pre-training, offering a new paradigm for domain-adaptive segmentation.
Purpose: This study aims to propose and investigate the feasibility of using Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) for CEST MRI data analysis (CEST-KAN). Methods: CEST MRI data were acquired from twelve healthy volunteers at 3T. Data from ten subjects were used for training, while the remaining two were reserved for testing. The performance of multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and KAN models with the same network settings were evaluated and compared to the conventional multi-pool Lorentzian fitting (MPLF) method in generating water and multiple CEST contrasts, including amide, relayed nuclear Overhauser effect (rNOE), and magnetization transfer (MT). Results: The water and CEST maps generated by both MLP and KAN were visually comparable to the MPLF results. However, the KAN model demonstrated higher accuracy in extrapolating the CEST fitting metrics, as evidenced by the smaller validation loss during training and smaller absolute error during testing. Voxel-wise correlation analysis showed that all four CEST fitting metrics generated by KAN consistently exhibited higher Pearson coefficients than the MLP results, indicating superior performance. Moreover, the KAN models consistently outperformed the MLP models in varying hidden layer numbers despite longer training time. Conclusion: In this study, we demonstrated for the first time the feasibility of utilizing KAN for CEST MRI data analysis, highlighting its superiority over MLP in this task. The findings suggest that CEST-KAN has the potential to be a robust and reliable post-analysis tool for CEST MRI in clinical settings.