nn-UNet Training on CycleGAN-Translated Images for Cross-modal Domain Adaptation in Biomedical Imaging

In recent years, deep learning models have considerably advanced the performance of segmentation tasks on Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). However, these models show a considerable performance drop when they are evaluated on unseen data from a different distribution. Since annotation is often a hard and costly task requiring expert supervision, it is necessary to develop ways in which existing models can be adapted to the unseen domains without any additional labelled information. In this work, we explore one such technique which extends the CycleGAN [2] architecture to generate label-preserving data in the target domain. The synthetic target domain data is used to train the nn-UNet [3] framework for the task of multi-label segmentation. The experiments are conducted and evaluated on the dataset [1] provided in the 'Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation' challenge [23] for segmentation of vestibular schwannoma (VS) tumour and cochlea on contrast enhanced (ceT1) and high resolution (hrT2) MRI scans. In the proposed approach, our model obtains dice scores (DSC) 0.73 and 0.49 for tumour and cochlea respectively on the validation set of the dataset. This indicates the applicability of the proposed technique to real-world problems where data may be obtained by different acquisition protocols as in [1] where hrT2 images are more reliable, safer, and lower-cost alternative to ceT1.