Unsupervised domain adaptation for medical imaging segmentation with self-ensembling.

Journal: NeuroImage
Published Date:

Abstract

Recent advances in deep learning methods have redefined the state-of-the-art for many medical imaging applications, surpassing previous approaches and sometimes even competing with human judgment in several tasks. Those models, however, when trained to reduce the empirical risk on a single domain, fail to generalize when applied to other domains, a very common scenario in medical imaging due to the variability of images and anatomical structures, even across the same imaging modality. In this work, we extend the method of unsupervised domain adaptation using self-ensembling for the semantic segmentation task and explore multiple facets of the method on a small and realistic publicly-available magnetic resonance (MRI) dataset. Through an extensive evaluation, we show that self-ensembling can indeed improve the generalization of the models even when using a small amount of unlabeled data.

Authors

  • Christian S Perone
    NeuroPoly Lab, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Polytechnique Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada.
  • Pedro Ballester
    Machine Intelligence and Robotics Research Group, School of Technology, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.
  • Rodrigo C Barros
    Grupo de Pesquisa em Aprendizado de Máquina e Inteligência de Negócio (GPIN), Faculdade de Informática, PUCRS, Prédio 32, Sala 628, 90619-900 Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.
  • Julien Cohen-Adad
    NeuroPoly Lab, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Polytechnique Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada; Functional Neuroimaging Unit, CRIUGM, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada.