M-GenSeg: Domain Adaptation For Target Modality Tumor Segmentation With Annotation-Efficient Supervision

TL;DR

M-GenSeg is a semi-supervised generative approach that improves cross-modality tumor segmentation by disentangling tumor features and translating images across modalities, reducing annotation needs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel semi-supervised training strategy that enables effective domain adaptation for tumor segmentation with limited annotations and unpaired datasets.

Findings

Consistently outperforms state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods in Dice scores.

Enables training with partially annotated source data.

Effective in unpaired multi-contrast brain tumor segmentation.

Abstract

Automated medical image segmentation using deep neural networks typically requires substantial supervised training. However, these models fail to generalize well across different imaging modalities. This shortcoming, amplified by the limited availability of expert annotated data, has been hampering the deployment of such methods at a larger scale across modalities. To address these issues, we propose M-GenSeg, a new semi-supervised generative training strategy for cross-modality tumor segmentation on unpaired bi-modal datasets. With the addition of known healthy images, an unsupervised objective encourages the model to disentangling tumors from the background, which parallels the segmentation task. Then, by teaching the model to convert images across modalities, we leverage available pixel-level annotations from the source modality to enable segmentation in the unannotated target modality. We evaluated the performance on a brain tumor segmentation dataset composed of four different contrast sequences from the public BraTS 2020 challenge data. We report consistent improvement in Dice scores over state-of-the-art domain-adaptive baselines on the unannotated target modality. Unlike the prior art, M-GenSeg also introduces the ability to train with a partially annotated source modality.