Plug-and-play Shape Refinement Framework for Multi-site and Lifespan Brain Skull Stripping
This work addresses the domain shift issue in skull stripping for brain MRI analysis, which is crucial for multi-site and lifespan studies, though it appears incremental as it builds on prior shape-based methods.
The paper tackles the problem of low generalization in brain MRI skull stripping across different imaging parameters and ages by introducing a plug-and-play shape refinement framework that leverages invariant brain shape priors, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multi-site lifespan datasets.
Skull stripping is a crucial prerequisite step in the analysis of brain magnetic resonance images (MRI). Although many excellent works or tools have been proposed, they suffer from low generalization capability. For instance, the model trained on a dataset with specific imaging parameters cannot be well applied to other datasets with different imaging parameters. Especially, for the lifespan datasets, the model trained on an adult dataset is not applicable to an infant dataset due to the large domain difference. To address this issue, numerous methods have been proposed, where domain adaptation based on feature alignment is the most common. Unfortunately, this method has some inherent shortcomings, which need to be retrained for each new domain and requires concurrent access to the input images of both domains. In this paper, we design a plug-and-play shape refinement (PSR) framework for multi-site and lifespan skull stripping. To deal with the domain shift between multi-site lifespan datasets, we take advantage of the brain shape prior, which is invariant to imaging parameters and ages. Experiments demonstrate that our framework can outperform the state-of-the-art methods on multi-site lifespan datasets.