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ASC: Appearance and Structure Consistency for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Fetal Brain MRI Segmentation

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Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2023 (MICCAI 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14226))

Abstract

Automatic tissue segmentation of fetal brain images is essential for the quantitative analysis of prenatal neurodevelopment. However, producing voxel-level annotations of fetal brain imaging is time-consuming and expensive. To reduce labeling costs, we propose a practical unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) setting that adapts the segmentation labels of high-quality fetal brain atlases to unlabeled fetal brain MRI data from another domain. To address the task, we propose a new UDA framework based on Appearance and Structure Consistency, named ASC. We adapt the segmentation model to the appearances of different domains by constraining the consistency before and after a frequency-based image transformation, which is to swap the appearance between brain MRI data and atlases. Consider that even in the same domain, the fetal brain images of different gestational ages could have significant variations in the anatomical structures. To make the model adapt to the structural variations in the target domain, we further encourage prediction consistency under different structural perturbations. Extensive experiments on FeTA 2021 benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our ASC in comparison to registration-based, semi-supervised learning-based, and existing UDA-based methods.

Z. Xu and H. Gong—This work is supported by Chinese Key-Area Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province (2020B0101350001), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.62102267), and the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (2023A1515011464), and the Shenzhen Science and Technology Program (JCYJ20220818103001002), and the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Big Data Computing, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.

Z. Xu and H. Gong—Contribute equally to this work.

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Xu, Z., Gong, H., Wan, X., Li, H. (2023). ASC: Appearance and Structure Consistency for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Fetal Brain MRI Segmentation. In: Greenspan, H., et al. Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2023. MICCAI 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14226. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43990-2_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43990-2_31

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