Edge-Guided Output Adaptor: Highly Efficient Adaptation Module for Cross-Vendor Medical Image Segmentation

Supervised convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated state-of-art performance in medical image segmentation tasks. However, the performance of a well-trained CNN on an independent dataset (e.g., different vendors, sequences) relies strongly on the distribution similarity, and may drop unexpectedly in case of distribution shift. To obtain a large amount of annotation from each new dataset for re-training the CNN is expensive and impractical. Adaptation algorithms to improve the CNN generalizability from source domain to target domain has significant practical value. In this work, we propose a highly efficient end-to-end domain adaptation approach, with left ventricle segmentation from cine MRI sequences as an example. We propose to perform domain adaptation in the output space where different domains share the strongest similarities. The core of this algorithm is a flexible and light output adaption module based on adversarial learning. Moreover, Canny edge detector is introduced to enhance model's attention to edges during adversarial learning. Comparative experiments were carried out using images from three major MR vendors (Philips, Siemens, and GE) as three domains. Our results demonstrated that the proposed method substantially improved the generalization of the trained CNN model from one vendor to other vendors without any additional annotation. Moreover, the ablation study proved that introducing Canny edge detector further refined the edge detection in segmentation. The proposed adaption is generic can be extended to other medical image segmentation problems.