Adaptive Frequency Domain Alignment Network for Medical image segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces AFDAN, a domain adaptation network that aligns features in the frequency domain to improve medical image segmentation across different datasets, addressing data scarcity and enhancing accuracy.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel frequency domain alignment framework with three modules for robust cross-domain medical image segmentation.

Findings

Achieves 90.9% IoU on vitiligo segmentation in VITILIGO2025 dataset.

Attains 82.6% IoU on retinal vessel segmentation benchmark DRIVE.

Surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in both tasks.

Abstract

High-quality annotated data plays a crucial role in achieving accurate segmentation. However, such data for medical image segmentation are often scarce due to the time-consuming and labor-intensive nature of manual annotation. To address this challenge, we propose the Adaptive Frequency Domain Alignment Network (AFDAN)--a novel domain adaptation framework designed to align features in the frequency domain and alleviate data scarcity. AFDAN integrates three core components to enable robust cross-domain knowledge transfer: an Adversarial Domain Learning Module that transfers features from the source to the target domain; a Source-Target Frequency Fusion Module that blends frequency representations across domains; and a Spatial-Frequency Integration Module that combines both frequency and spatial features to further enhance segmentation accuracy across domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AFDAN: it achieves an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 90.9% for vitiligo segmentation in the newly constructed VITILIGO2025 dataset and a competitive IoU of 82.6% on the retinal vessel segmentation benchmark DRIVE, surpassing existing state-of-the-art approaches.