Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation Using Transformer With Meta Attention

Area of Science:

• Medical Image Analysis
• Computer Vision
• Artificial Intelligence

Background:

• Accurate medical image segmentation is crucial for diagnosis and treatment.
• Fully-supervised methods are limited by the need for expert annotations.
• Domain shift between imaging modalities hinders performance in unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA).

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel UDA framework for cross-modality medical image segmentation using Transformers.
• To address the limitations of existing UDA methods and investigate Transformer adaptability.
• To improve segmentation performance across different medical imaging modalities without manual annotations.

Main Methods:

• Proposed a novel Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) framework leveraging Transformer architecture.
• Introduced Meta Attention (MA) for a fully attention-based alignment scheme.
• Enabled learning of hierarchical attention consistencies for discriminative information transfer between modalities.

Main Results:

• Achieved significant performance improvements in cross-modality segmentation tasks.
• Demonstrated superior results compared to state-of-the-art UDA methods.
• Validated the framework on whole heart, abdominal organ, and brain tumor segmentation datasets.

Conclusions:

• The proposed Transformer-based UDA framework with Meta Attention effectively addresses cross-modality segmentation challenges.
• The method enhances the transfer of attentive information, leading to improved segmentation accuracy.
• This approach offers a promising solution for medical image analysis where labeled data is scarce or domain shift is present.