NCAdapt: Dynamic adaptation with domain-specific Neural Cellular Automata for continual hippocampus segmentation
This addresses the problem of adapting medical imaging models to new domains while retaining knowledge, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing NCA and CL methods.
The paper tackles continual learning for hippocampus segmentation by introducing NCAdapt, a Neural Cellular Automata-based method with a domain-specific multi-head structure, achieving state-of-the-art performance with only 384 parameters per new domain.
Continual learning (CL) in medical imaging presents a unique challenge, requiring models to adapt to new domains while retaining previously acquired knowledge. We introduce NCAdapt, a Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) based method designed to address this challenge. NCAdapt features a domain-specific multi-head structure, integrating adaptable convolutional layers into the NCA backbone for each new domain encountered. After initial training, the NCA backbone is frozen, and only the newly added adaptable convolutional layers, consisting of 384 parameters, are trained along with domain-specific NCA convolutions. We evaluate NCAdapt on hippocampus segmentation tasks, benchmarking its performance against Lifelong nnU-Net and U-Net models with state-of-the-art (SOTA) CL methods. Our lightweight approach achieves SOTA performance, underscoring its effectiveness in addressing CL challenges in medical imaging. Upon acceptance, we will make our code base publicly accessible to support reproducibility and foster further advancements in medical CL.