An unsupervised domain adaptation brain CT segmentation method across image modalities and diseases

Computed tomography (CT) is the primary diagnostic tool for brain diseases. To determine the appropriate treatment plan, it is necessary to ascertain the patient’s bleeding volume. Automatic segmentation algorithms for hemorrhagic lesions can significantly improve efficiency and avoid treatment delays. However, for deep supervised learning algorithms, a large amount of labeled training data is usually required, making them difficult to apply clinically. In this study, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation method that is an unsupervised domain adaptation segmentation model that can be trained across modalities and diseases. We call it AMD-DAS for brain CT hemorrhage segmentation tasks. This circumvents the heavy data labeling task by converting the source domain data (MRI with glioma) to our task’s required data (CT with Intraparenchymal hemorrhage (IPH)). Our model implements a two-stage domain adaptation process to achieve this objective. In the first stage, we train a pseudo-CT image synthesis network using the CycleGAN architecture through a matching mechanism and domain adaptation approach. In the second stage, we use the model trained in the first stage to synthesize the pseudo-CT images. We use the pseudo-CT with source domain labels and real CT images to train a domain-adaptation segmentation model. Our method exhibits a better performance than the basic one-stage domain adaptation segmentation method (+11.55 Dice score) and achieves an 86.93 Dice score in the IPH unsupervised segmentation task. Our model can be trained without using a ground-truth label, therefore increasing its application potential. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/GuanghuiFU/AMD-DAS-Brain-CT-Segmentation. •Solve unsupervised segmentation problem in a novel domain adaptation way.•Decoupling domain adaptation process in 2 stages.•Integrated matching mechanism to further improve performance.