Towards contrast- and pathology-agnostic clinical fetal brain MRI segmentation using SynthSeg

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shang, Ziyao, Kaandorp, Misha, Payette, Kelly, Garcia, Marina Fernandez, Licandro, Roxane, Langs, Georg, Verdera, Jordina Aviles, Hutter, Jana, Menze, Bjoern, Kasprian, Gregor, Cuadra, Meritxell Bach, Jakab, Andras
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Shang, Ziyao
Kaandorp, Misha
Payette, Kelly
Garcia, Marina Fernandez
Licandro, Roxane
Langs, Georg
Verdera, Jordina Aviles
Hutter, Jana
Menze, Bjoern
Kasprian, Gregor
Cuadra, Meritxell Bach
Jakab, Andras
author_facet Shang, Ziyao
Kaandorp, Misha
Payette, Kelly
Garcia, Marina Fernandez
Licandro, Roxane
Langs, Georg
Verdera, Jordina Aviles
Hutter, Jana
Menze, Bjoern
Kasprian, Gregor
Cuadra, Meritxell Bach
Jakab, Andras
contents Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has played a crucial role in fetal neurodevelopmental research. Structural annotations of MR images are an important step for quantitative analysis of the developing human brain, with Deep Learning providing an automated alternative for this otherwise tedious manual process. However, segmentation performances of Convolutional Neural Networks often suffer from domain shift, where the network fails when applied to subjects that deviate from the distribution with which it is trained on. In this work, we aim to train networks capable of automatically segmenting fetal brain MRIs with a wide range of domain shifts pertaining to differences in subject physiology and acquisition environments, in particular shape-based differences commonly observed in pathological cases. We introduce a novel data-driven train-time sampling strategy that seeks to fully exploit the diversity of a given training dataset to enhance the domain generalizability of the trained networks. We adapted our sampler, together with other existing data augmentation techniques, to the SynthSeg framework, a generator that utilizes domain randomization to generate diverse training data. We ran thorough experimentations and ablation studies on a wide range of training/testing data to test the validity of the approaches. Our networks achieved notable improvements in the segmentation quality on testing subjects with intense anatomical abnormalities (p < 1e-4), though at the cost of a slighter decrease in performance in cases with fewer abnormalities. Our work also lays the foundation for future works on creating and adapting data-driven sampling strategies for other training pipelines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_10244
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards contrast- and pathology-agnostic clinical fetal brain MRI segmentation using SynthSeg
Shang, Ziyao
Kaandorp, Misha
Payette, Kelly
Garcia, Marina Fernandez
Licandro, Roxane
Langs, Georg
Verdera, Jordina Aviles
Hutter, Jana
Menze, Bjoern
Kasprian, Gregor
Cuadra, Meritxell Bach
Jakab, Andras
Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has played a crucial role in fetal neurodevelopmental research. Structural annotations of MR images are an important step for quantitative analysis of the developing human brain, with Deep Learning providing an automated alternative for this otherwise tedious manual process. However, segmentation performances of Convolutional Neural Networks often suffer from domain shift, where the network fails when applied to subjects that deviate from the distribution with which it is trained on. In this work, we aim to train networks capable of automatically segmenting fetal brain MRIs with a wide range of domain shifts pertaining to differences in subject physiology and acquisition environments, in particular shape-based differences commonly observed in pathological cases. We introduce a novel data-driven train-time sampling strategy that seeks to fully exploit the diversity of a given training dataset to enhance the domain generalizability of the trained networks. We adapted our sampler, together with other existing data augmentation techniques, to the SynthSeg framework, a generator that utilizes domain randomization to generate diverse training data. We ran thorough experimentations and ablation studies on a wide range of training/testing data to test the validity of the approaches. Our networks achieved notable improvements in the segmentation quality on testing subjects with intense anatomical abnormalities (p < 1e-4), though at the cost of a slighter decrease in performance in cases with fewer abnormalities. Our work also lays the foundation for future works on creating and adapting data-driven sampling strategies for other training pipelines.
title Towards contrast- and pathology-agnostic clinical fetal brain MRI segmentation using SynthSeg
topic Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10244