Style-invariant Cardiac Image Segmentation with Test-time Augmentation

Abstract

Deep models often suffer from severe performance drop due to the appearance shift in the real clinical setting. Most of the existing learning-based methods rely on images from multiple sites/vendors or even corresponding labels. However, collecting enough unknown data to robustly model segmentation cannot always hold since the complex appearance shift caused by imaging factors in daily application. In this paper, we propose a novel style-invariant method for cardiac image segmentation. Based on the zero-shot style transfer to remove appearance shift and test-time augmentation to explore diverse underlying anatomy, our proposed method is effective in combating the appearance shift. Our contribution is three-fold. First, inspired by the spirit of universal style transfer, we develop a zero-shot stylization for content images to generate stylized images that appearance similarity to the style images. Second, we build up a robust cardiac segmentation model based on the U-Net structure. Our framework mainly consists of two networks during testing: the ST network for removing appearance shift and the segmentation network. Third, we investigate test-time augmentation to explore transformed versions of the stylized image for prediction and the results are merged. Notably, our proposed framework is fully test-time adaptation. Experiment results demonstrate that our methods are promising and generic for generalizing deep segmentation models.