Transfer Learning for Image Segmentation by Combining Image Weighting and Kernel Learning

Annegreet van Opbroek, Hakim C. Achterberg, Meike W. Vernooij, Marleen de Bruijne

    28 Citations (Scopus)
    162 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    Many medical image segmentation methods are based on the supervised classification of voxels. Such methods generally perform well when provided with a training set that is representative of the test images to the segment. However, problems may arise when training and test data follow different distributions, for example, due to differences in scanners, scanning protocols, or patient groups. Under such conditions, weighting training images according to distribution similarity have been shown to greatly improve performance. However, this assumes that a part of the training data is representative of the test data; it does not make unrepresentative data more similar. We, therefore, investigate kernel learning as a way to reduce differences between training and test data and explore the added value of kernel learning for image weighting. We also propose a new image weighting method that minimizes maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) between training and test data, which enables the joint optimization of image weights and kernel. Experiments on brain tissue, white matter lesion, and hippocampus segmentation show that both kernel learning and image weighting, when used separately, greatly improve performance on heterogeneous data. Here, MMD weighting obtains similar performance to previously proposed image weighting methods. Combining image weighting and kernel learning, optimized either individually or jointly, can give a small additional improvement in performance.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number8419778
    JournalIEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
    Volume38
    Issue number1
    Pages (from-to)213-224
    ISSN0278-0062
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Jan 2019

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