Rethink Domain Generalization in Heterogeneous Sequence MRI Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Zheyuan, Peng, Linkai, Dou, Wanying, Sun, Cuiling, Aktas, Halil Ertugrul, Bejar, Andrea M., Keles, Elif, Durak, Gorkem, Bagci, Ulas
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866915419548286976
author Zhang, Zheyuan
Peng, Linkai
Dou, Wanying
Sun, Cuiling
Aktas, Halil Ertugrul
Bejar, Andrea M.
Keles, Elif
Durak, Gorkem
Bagci, Ulas
author_facet Zhang, Zheyuan
Peng, Linkai
Dou, Wanying
Sun, Cuiling
Aktas, Halil Ertugrul
Bejar, Andrea M.
Keles, Elif
Durak, Gorkem
Bagci, Ulas
contents Clinical magnetic-resonance (MR) protocols generate many T1 and T2 sequences whose appearance differs more than the acquisition sites that produce them. Existing domain-generalization benchmarks focus almost on cross-center shifts and overlook this dominant source of variability. Pancreas segmentation remains a major challenge in abdominal imaging: the gland is small, irregularly, surrounded by organs and fat, and often suffers from low T1 contrast. State-of-the-art deep networks that already achieve >90% Dice on the liver or kidneys still miss 20-30% of the pancreas. The organ is also systematically under-represented in public cross-domain benchmarks, despite its clinical importance in early cancer detection, surgery, and diabetes research. To close this gap, we present PancreasDG, a large-scale multi-center 3D MRI pancreas segmentation dataset for investigating domain generalization in medical imaging. The dataset comprises 563 MRI scans from six institutions, spanning both venous phase and out-of-phase sequences, enabling study of both cross-center and cross-sequence variations with pixel-accurate pancreas masks created by a double-blind, two-pass protocol. Through comprehensive analysis, we reveal three insights: (i) limited sampling introduces significant variance that may be mistaken for distribution shifts, (ii) cross-center performance correlates with source domain performance for identical sequences, and (iii) cross-sequence shifts require specialized solutions. We also propose a semi-supervised approach that leverages anatomical invariances, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art domain generalization techniques with 61.63% Dice score improvements and 87.00% on two test centers for cross-sequence segmentation. PancreasDG sets a new benchmark for domain generalization in medical imaging. Dataset, code, and models will be available at https://pancreasdg.netlify.app.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_23110
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethink Domain Generalization in Heterogeneous Sequence MRI Segmentation
Zhang, Zheyuan
Peng, Linkai
Dou, Wanying
Sun, Cuiling
Aktas, Halil Ertugrul
Bejar, Andrea M.
Keles, Elif
Durak, Gorkem
Bagci, Ulas
Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Clinical magnetic-resonance (MR) protocols generate many T1 and T2 sequences whose appearance differs more than the acquisition sites that produce them. Existing domain-generalization benchmarks focus almost on cross-center shifts and overlook this dominant source of variability. Pancreas segmentation remains a major challenge in abdominal imaging: the gland is small, irregularly, surrounded by organs and fat, and often suffers from low T1 contrast. State-of-the-art deep networks that already achieve >90% Dice on the liver or kidneys still miss 20-30% of the pancreas. The organ is also systematically under-represented in public cross-domain benchmarks, despite its clinical importance in early cancer detection, surgery, and diabetes research. To close this gap, we present PancreasDG, a large-scale multi-center 3D MRI pancreas segmentation dataset for investigating domain generalization in medical imaging. The dataset comprises 563 MRI scans from six institutions, spanning both venous phase and out-of-phase sequences, enabling study of both cross-center and cross-sequence variations with pixel-accurate pancreas masks created by a double-blind, two-pass protocol. Through comprehensive analysis, we reveal three insights: (i) limited sampling introduces significant variance that may be mistaken for distribution shifts, (ii) cross-center performance correlates with source domain performance for identical sequences, and (iii) cross-sequence shifts require specialized solutions. We also propose a semi-supervised approach that leverages anatomical invariances, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art domain generalization techniques with 61.63% Dice score improvements and 87.00% on two test centers for cross-sequence segmentation. PancreasDG sets a new benchmark for domain generalization in medical imaging. Dataset, code, and models will be available at https://pancreasdg.netlify.app.
title Rethink Domain Generalization in Heterogeneous Sequence MRI Segmentation
topic Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23110