ConDiSR: Contrastive Disentanglement and Style Regularization for Single Domain Generalization
This work addresses domain shifts in medical image classification, an incremental improvement for healthcare applications where data privacy limits multi-source training.
The paper tackled the problem of single domain generalization for medical image classification by introducing a method using channel-wise contrastive disentanglement and style regularization, which surpassed state-of-the-art baselines by 1% in average accuracy and showed more stable performance.
Medical data often exhibits distribution shifts, which cause test-time performance degradation for deep learning models trained using standard supervised learning pipelines. This challenge is addressed in the field of Domain Generalization (DG) with the sub-field of Single Domain Generalization (SDG) being specifically interesting due to the privacy- or logistics-related issues often associated with medical data. Existing disentanglement-based SDG methods heavily rely on structural information embedded in segmentation masks, however classification labels do not provide such dense information. This work introduces a novel SDG method aimed at medical image classification that leverages channel-wise contrastive disentanglement. It is further enhanced with reconstruction-based style regularization to ensure extraction of distinct style and structure feature representations. We evaluate our method on the complex task of multicenter histopathology image classification, comparing it against state-of-the-art (SOTA) SDG baselines. Results demonstrate that our method surpasses the SOTA by a margin of 1% in average accuracy while also showing more stable performance. This study highlights the importance and challenges of exploring SDG frameworks in the context of the classification task. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/BioMedIA-MBZUAI/ConDiSR