Tissue Segmentation of Thick-Slice Fetal Brain MR Scans with Guidance from High-Quality Isotropic Volumes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel domain adaptation network that leverages high-quality isotropic fetal brain MR volumes to improve tissue segmentation accuracy in thick-slice fetal brain scans, addressing domain gaps and limited annotations.

Contribution

The study proposes C2DA-Net, a cycle-consistent domain adaptation framework that effectively transfers knowledge from high-quality isotropic volumes to thick-slice scans for improved segmentation.

Findings

C2DA-Net outperforms existing methods quantitatively.

The approach effectively utilizes limited annotated data.

Significant improvement in segmentation accuracy on large dataset.

Abstract

Accurate tissue segmentation of thick-slice fetal brain magnetic resonance (MR) scans is crucial for both reconstruction of isotropic brain MR volumes and the quantification of fetal brain development. However, this task is challenging due to the use of thick-slice scans in clinically-acquired fetal brain data. To address this issue, we propose to leverage high-quality isotropic fetal brain MR volumes (and also their corresponding annotations) as guidance for segmentation of thick-slice scans. Due to existence of significant domain gap between high-quality isotropic volume (i.e., source data) and thick-slice scans (i.e., target data), we employ a domain adaptation technique to achieve the associated knowledge transfer (from high-quality <source> volumes to thick-slice <target> scans). Specifically, we first register the available high-quality isotropic fetal brain MR volumes across different gestational weeks to construct longitudinally-complete source data. To capture domain-invariant information, we then perform Fourier decomposition to extract image content and style codes. Finally, we propose a novel Cycle-Consistent Domain Adaptation Network (C2DA-Net) to efficiently transfer the knowledge learned from high-quality isotropic volumes for accurate tissue segmentation of thick-slice scans. Our C2DA-Net can fully utilize a small set of annotated isotropic volumes to guide tissue segmentation on unannotated thick-slice scans. Extensive experiments on a large-scale dataset of 372 clinically acquired thick-slice MR scans demonstrate that our C2DA-Net achieves much better performance than cutting-edge methods quantitatively and qualitatively.