Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation by Disentanglement Learning and Self-Training.

Aggregating multi-level feature representation plays a critical role in achieving robust volumetric medical image segmentation, which is important for the auxiliary diagnosis and treatment. Unlike the recent neural architecture search (NAS) methods that typically searched the optimal operators in each network layer, but missed a good strategy to search for feature aggregations, this paper proposes a novel NAS method for 3D medical image segmentation, named UXNet, which searches both the scale-wise feature aggregation strategies as well as the block-wise operators in the encoder-decoder network. UXNet has several appealing benefits. (1) It significantly improves flexibility of the classical UNet architecture, which only aggregates feature representations of encoder and decoder in equivalent resolution. (2) A continuous relaxation of UXNet is carefully designed, enabling its searching scheme performed in an efficient differentiable manner. (3) Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of UXNet compared with recent NAS methods for medical image segmentation. The architecture discovered by UXNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in terms of Dice on several public 3D medical image segmentation benchmarks, especially for the boundary locations and tiny tissues. The searching computational complexity of UXNet is cheap, enabling to search a network with best performance less than 1.5 days on two TitanXP GPUs.

Medical image segmentation methods are generally designed as fully-supervised to guarantee model performance, which requires a significant amount of expert annotated samples that are high-cost and laborious. Semi-supervised image segmentation can alleviate the problem by utilizing a large number of unlabeled images along with limited labeled images. However, learning a robust representation from numerous unlabeled images remains challenging due to potential noise in pseudo labels and insufficient class separability in feature space, which undermines the performance of current semi-supervised segmentation approaches. To address the issues above, we propose a novel semi-supervised segmentation method named as Rectified Contrastive Pseudo Supervision (RCPS), which combines a rectified pseudo supervision and voxel-level contrastive learning to improve the effectiveness of semi-supervised segmentation. Particularly, we design a novel rectification strategy for the pseudo supervision method based on uncertainty estimation and consistency regularization to reduce the noise influence in pseudo labels. Furthermore, we introduce a bidirectional voxel contrastive loss in the network to ensure intra-class consistency and inter-class contrast in feature space, which increases class separability in the segmentation. The proposed RCPS segmentation method has been validated on two public datasets and an in-house clinical dataset. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method yields better segmentation performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods in semi-supervised medical image segmentation. The source code is available at https://github.com/hsiangyuzhao/RCPS.

Unsupervised domain adaptive object detection aims to adapt a well-trained detector from its original source domain with rich labeled data to a new target domain with unlabeled data. Recently, mainstream approaches perform this task through adversarial learning, yet still suffer from two limitations. First, they mainly align marginal distribution by unsupervised cross-domain feature matching, and ignore each feature's categorical and positional information that can be exploited for conditional alignment; Second, they treat all classes as equally important for transferring cross-domain knowledge and ignore that different classes usually have different transferability. In this article, we propose a joint adaptive detection framework (JADF) to address the above challenges. First, an end-to-end joint adversarial adaptation framework for object detection is proposed, which aligns both marginal and conditional distributions between domains without introducing any extra hyper-parameter. Next, to consider the transferability of each object class, a metric for class-wise transferability assessment is proposed, which is incorporated into the JADF objective for domain adaptation. Further, an extended study from unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) to unsupervised few-shot domain adaptation (UFDA) is conducted, where only a few unlabeled training images are available in unlabeled target domain. Extensive experiments validate that JADF is effective in both the UDA and UFDA settings, achieving significant performance gains over existing state-of-the-art cross-domain detection methods.

An efficient neural network based method for medical image segmentation

Conventional machine learning relies on two presumptions: (1) the training and testing datasets follow the same independent distribution, and (2) an adequate quantity of samples is essential for achieving optimal model performance during training. Nevertheless, meeting these two assumptions can be challenging in real-world scenarios. Domain adaptation (DA) is a subfield of transfer learning that focuses on reducing the distribution difference between the source domain (Ds) and target domain (Dt) and subsequently applying the knowledge gained from the Ds task to the Dt task. The majority of current DA methods aim to achieve domain invariance by aligning the marginal probability distributions of the Ds. and Dt. Recent studies have pointed out that aligning marginal probability distributions alone is not sufficient and that alignment of conditional probability distributions is equally important for knowledge migration. Nonetheless, unsupervised DA presents a more significant difficulty in aligning the conditional probability distributions because of the unavailability of labels for the Dt. In response to this issue, there have been several proposed methods by researchers, including pseudo-labeling, which offer novel solutions to tackle the problem. In this paper, we systematically analyze various pseudo-labeling algorithms and their applications in unsupervised DA. First , we summarize the pseudo-label generation methods based on the single and multiple classifiers and actions taken to deal with the problem of imbalanced samples. Second, we investigate the application of pseudo-labeling in category feature alignment and improving feature discrimination. Finally, we point out the challenges and trends of pseudo-labeling algorithms. As far as we know, this article is the initial review of pseudo-labeling techniques for unsupervised DA.

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are a powerful deep learning method for medical image segmentation. However performance in clinical practice often deteriorates when attempting to generalize models trained from a particular source domain to a different target domain (e.g. different vendor, acquisition parameters, protocols). To address this issue, domain adaptation has attracted increasing attention because it can minimize distribution differences among different but related domains. Extending from this prior work, we introduce Co-Unet-GAN, a co-learning domain adaptation and segmentation model addressing the domain shift problem. In this model, we train a Unet segmentation network and an image translation generative adversarial network (GAN) together to generalize performance across domains given supervised data only in the source domain. We evaluate our model on two large open echocardiography datasets, using the CAMUS set as supervised source domain and EchoNet-Dynamic as the unsupervised target. In this context, we obtain mean absolute error on ejection fraction of 9.67% on Co-Unet-GAN compared to 11.28% for a previously published Unet-GAN. Our Co-Unet-GAN for image translation and segmentation is a promising solution to the domain shift problem.

Medical image segmentation is a critical application of computer vision in the analysis of medical images. Its primary objective is to isolate regions of interest in medical images from the background, thereby assisting clinicians in accurately identifying lesions, their sizes, locations, and their relationships with surrounding tissues. However, compared to natural images, medical images present unique challenges, such as low resolution, poor contrast, inconsistency, and scattered target regions. Furthermore, the accuracy and stability of segmentation results are subject to more stringent requirements. In recent years, with the widespread application of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in computer vision, deep learning-based methods for medical image segmentation have become a focal point of research. This paper categorizes, reviews, and summarizes the current representative methods and research status in the field of medical image segmentation. A comparative analysis of relevant experiments is presented, along with an introduction to commonly used public datasets, performance evaluation metrics, and loss functions in medical image segmentation. Finally, potential future research directions and development trends in this field are predicted and analyzed.

Dynamic domain generalization for medical image segmentation.

Federated learning is a distributed learning framework designed to facilitate collaborative training of deep learning models at the network edge, ensuring the privacy and security of users while effectively responding to the challenges posed by data silos within the healthcare domain. However, deploying intricate medical segmentation network models in realistic settings often leads to substantial communication overhead for federated learning clients, thereby severely undermining the operational efficiency of federated systems. In light of these issues, we propose an innovative federated learning approach known as FedSKD, which is intended to alleviate the significant communication overhead incurred during medical image segmentation tasks in federated learning. This method strikes a delicate balance between communication costs and model training accuracy. A key feature of the FedSKD framework is incorporating a self-knowledge distillation mechanism, which encompasses both prediction map distillation loss and feature map distillation loss. This integration plays a key role in enhancing model accuracy without the need for training an additional resource-intensive mentor model, thereby optimizing computational efficiency. Additionally, we introduce parameter difference dynamic compression technology to compress communications, resulting in a reduction of communication costs by more than 30% within the federated system. Furthermore, extensive experiments utilizing FedSKD were conducted on widely recognized public medical segmentation datasets such as KiTS19 and COVID-19. The experimental findings unequivocally demonstrate that our FedSKD not only significantly diminishes the expenses associated with federated communication but also enhances overall model accuracy.

A wavelet transform-based image segmentation method

Dense-sparse representation matters: A point-based method for volumetric medical image segmentation

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals convey abundant physiological and psychological information. Decoding EEG is fundamental for brain-computer interaction and medical rehabilitation. Nevertheless, the nonstationarity and inter-individual variability of EEG signals impedes current models from achieving robust crosssubject generalization without expensive subject-specific recalibration, thereby restricting practical deployment. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to improve generalization by minimizing distribution discrepancies between source and target domains. Recent studies regard different subjects as distinct domains and leverage UDA to facilitate cross-subject EEG classification by learning domain-invariant features through discrepancy minimization or adversarial training. However, these conventional methods are all developed in Euclidean space, which are insufficient to capture the non-linear structures inherent in EEG data. To address this limitation, we propose a Deep Adversarial Neural Network on the Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrix manifold, referred to as SPD-DANN, which facilitates the extraction of subject-invariant features through adversarial learning. Additionally, we design an SPD domain feature alignment loss and an SPD class prototype pair loss to simultaneously promote feature alignment across subjects and enhance feature space discriminability. Extensive experiments on four brain-computer interface (BCI) datasets demonstrate that our method surpasses several state-of-the-art UDA techniques. Furthermore, the proposed loss functions are readily adaptable to broader unsupervised or semi-supervised domain adaptation frameworks.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is an important solution to reduce the bias between the labeled source domain and the unlabeled target domain. It has attracted more attention for optical remote sensing image scene classification and retrieval. Currently, most of the previous work is devoted to closed-set UDA. In fact, the target domain often contains unknown classes. Moreover, some open UDA methods mine structural information of the target domain directly from the type knowledge of the source domain, and less directly from the unlabeled data of the target domain. In this paper, we propose a new self-supervised-driven open-set UDA method combining contrastive self-supervised learning with consistency self-training for optical remote sensing scene classification and retrieval. Specifically, a contrastive self-supervised learning network is introduced to learn discriminative features from the unlabeled target domain data. Moreover, a novel open-set class learning module is developed based on two-level confidence rules and the consistency self-training strategy, which can obtain reliable unknown class samples for co-training. Finally, an open-set dataset including six cross-domain scenarios is constructed based on three public datasets and several experiments are conducted with eleven state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior performances on the six open-set cross-domain scenarios in both scene classification and retrieval. Especially, our method improves the overall classification accuracies by 9.72% to 24.06% and improve mean average retrieval precisions by 8.06% to 16.21% on the complex UCMD (source domain) → NWPU (target domain) scenario, compared with the other eleven state-of-the-art methods.

Domain adaptation (DA) is a representation learning methodology that transfers knowledge from a label-sufficient source domain to a label-scarce target domain. While most of early methods are focused on unsupervised DA (UDA), several studies on semi-supervised DA (SSDA) are recently suggested. In SSDA, a small number of labeled target images are given for training, and the effectiveness of those data is demonstrated by the previous studies. However, the previous SSDA approaches solely adopt those data for embedding ordinary supervised losses, overlooking the potential usefulness of the few yet informative clues. Based on this observation, in this paper, we propose a novel method that further exploits the labeled target images for SSDA. Specifically, we utilize labeled target images to selectively generate pseudo labels for unlabeled target images. In addition, based on the observation that pseudo labels are inevitably noisy, we apply a label noise-robust learning scheme, which progressively updates the network and the set of pseudo labels by turns. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms other previous state-of-the-art SSDA methods.

Unsupervised domain adaptation(UDA) has been applied to image semantic segmentation to solve the problem of domain offset. However, in some difficult categories with poor recognition accuracy, the segmentation effects are still not ideal. To this end, in this paper, Intra-subdomain adaptation adversarial learning segmentation method based on Dynamic Pseudo Labels(IDPL) is proposed. The whole process consists of 3 steps: Firstly, the instance-level pseudo label dynamic generation module is proposed, which fuses the class matching information in global classes and local instances, thus adaptively generating the optimal threshold for each class, obtaining high-quality pseudo labels. Secondly, the subdomain classifier module based on instance confidence is constructed, which can dynamically divide the target domain into easy and difficult subdomains according to the relative proportion of easy and difficult instances. Finally, the subdomain adversarial learning module based on self-attention is proposed. It uses multi-head self-attention to confront the easy and difficult subdomains at the class level with the help of generated high-quality pseudo labels, so as to focus on mining the features of difficult categories in the high-entropy region of target domain images, which promotes class-level conditional distribution alignment between the subdomains, improving the segmentation performance of difficult categories. For the difficult categories, the experimental results show that the performance of IDPL is significantly improved compared with other latest mainstream methods.