Style Content Decomposition-based Data Augmentation for Domain Generalizable Medical Image Segmentation
This addresses domain generalization for medical image segmentation, enabling more robust deployment across diverse imaging modalities, though it is incremental as it builds on existing decomposition and augmentation concepts.
The paper tackles domain shifts in medical image segmentation by decomposing images into style and content components, and introduces StyCona, a data augmentation algorithm that improves model generalization, achieving superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in cardiac MRI and fundus photography tasks.
Due to domain shifts across diverse medical imaging modalities, learned segmentation models often suffer significant performance degradation during deployment. We posit that these domain shifts can generally be categorized into two main components: 1) "style" shifts, referring to global disparities in image properties such as illumination, contrast, and color; and 2) "content" shifts, which involve local discrepancies in anatomical structures. To address the domain shifts in medical image segmentation, we first factorize an image into style codes and content maps, explicitly modeling the "style" and "content" components. Building on this, we introduce a Style-Content decomposition-based data augmentation algorithm (StyCona), which performs augmentation on both the global style and local content of source-domain images, enabling the training of a well-generalized model for domain generalizable medical image segmentation. StyCona is a simple yet effective plug-and-play module that substantially improves model generalization without requiring additional training parameters or modifications to segmentation model architectures. Experiments on cardiac magnetic resonance imaging and fundus photography segmentation tasks, with single and multiple target domains respectively, demonstrate the effectiveness of StyCona and its superiority over state-of-the-art domain generalization methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Senyh/StyCona.