SmaRT: Style-Modulated Robust Test-Time Adaptation for Cross-Domain Brain Tumor Segmentation in MRI

Abstract

Reliable brain tumor segmentation in MRI is indispensable for treatment planning and outcome monitoring, yet models trained on curated benchmarks often fail under domain shifts arising from scanner and protocol variability as well as population heterogeneity. Such gaps are especially severe in low-resource and pediatric cohorts, where conventional test-time or source-free adaptation strategies often suffer from instability and structural inconsistency. We propose SmaRT, a style-modulated robust test-time adaptation framework that enables source-free cross-domain generalization. SmaRT integrates style-aware augmentation to mitigate appearance discrepancies, a dual-branch momentum strategy for stable pseudo-label refinement, and structural priors enforcing consistency, integrity, and connectivity. This synergy ensures both adaptation stability and anatomical fidelity under extreme domain shifts. Extensive evaluations on sub-Saharan Africa and pediatric glioma datasets show that SmaRT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with notable gains in Dice accuracy and boundary precision. Overall, SmaRT bridges the gap between algorithmic advances and equitable clinical applicability, supporting robust deployment of MRI-based neuro-oncology tools in diverse clinical environments. Our source code is available at https://github.com/baiyou1234/SmaRT.