Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Content Alignment for Hippocampus Segmentation
This addresses the problem of accurate medical image segmentation across diverse populations for clinical applications, representing a domain-specific incremental advance.
The paper tackles domain shift in cross-domain hippocampus segmentation from MRI by proposing an unsupervised domain adaptation framework that combines style harmonization with bidirectional deformable image registration, achieving up to 15% relative improvement in Dice score when transferring from healthy to dementia patient populations.
Deep learning models for medical image segmentation often struggle when deployed across different datasets due to domain shifts - variations in both image appearance, known as style, and population-dependent anatomical characteristics, referred to as content. This paper presents a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework that directly addresses domain shifts encountered in cross-domain hippocampus segmentation from MRI, with specific emphasis on content variations. Our approach combines efficient style harmonisation through z-normalisation with a bidirectional deformable image registration (DIR) strategy. The DIR network is jointly trained with segmentation and discriminator networks to guide the registration with respect to a region of interest and generate anatomically plausible transformations that align source images to the target domain. We validate our approach through comprehensive evaluations on both a synthetic dataset using Morpho-MNIST (for controlled validation of core principles) and three MRI hippocampus datasets representing populations with varying degrees of atrophy. Across all experiments, our method outperforms existing baselines. For hippocampus segmentation, when transferring from young, healthy populations to clinical dementia patients, our framework achieves up to 15% relative improvement in Dice score compared to standard augmentation methods, with the largest gains observed in scenarios with substantial content shift. These results highlight the efficacy of our approach for accurate hippocampus segmentation across diverse populations.