The need for training data can impede the adoption of novel imaging modalities for learning-based medical image analysis. Domain adaptation methods partially mitigate this problem by translating training data from a related source domain to a novel target domain, but typically assume that a one-to-one translation is possible. Our work addresses the challenge of adapting to a more informative target domain where multiple target samples can emerge from a single source sample. In particular we consider translating from mp-MRI to VERDICT, a richer MRI modality involving an optimized acquisition protocol for cancer characterization. We explicitly account for the inherent uncertainty of this mapping and exploit it to generate multiple outputs conditioned on a single input. Our results show that this allows us to extract systematically better image representations for the target domain, when used in tandem with both simple, CycleGAN-based baselines, as well as more powerful approaches that integrate discriminative segmentation losses and/or residual adapters. When compared to its deterministic counterparts, our approach yields substantial improvements across a broad range of dataset sizes, increasingly strong baselines, and evaluation measures.
Quantifying uncertainty in a model's predictions is important as it enables, for example, the safety of an AI system to be increased by acting on the model's output in an informed manner. We cannot expect a system to be 100% accurate or perfect at its task, however, we can equip the system with some tools to inform us if it is not certain about a prediction. This way, a second check can be performed, or the task can be passed to a human specialist. This is crucial for applications where the cost of an error is high, such as in autonomous vehicle control, medical image analysis, financial estimations or legal fields. Deep Neural Networks are powerful black box predictors that have recently achieved impressive performance on a wide spectrum of tasks. Quantifying predictive uncertainty in DNNs is a challenging and yet on-going problem. Although there have been many efforts to equip NNs with tools to estimate uncertainty, such as Monte Carlo Dropout, most of the previous methods only focus on one of the three types of model, data or distributional uncertainty. In this paper we propose a complete framework to capture and quantify all of these three types of uncertainties in DNNs for image classification. This framework includes an ensemble of CNNs for model uncertainty, a supervised reconstruction auto-encoder to capture distributional uncertainty and using the output of activation functions in the last layer of the network, to capture data uncertainty. Finally we demonstrate the efficiency of our method on popular image datasets for classification.
In this paper, we study the formalism of unsupervised multi-class domain adaptation (multi-class UDA), which underlies a few recent algorithms whose learning objectives are only motivated empirically. Multi-Class Scoring Disagreement (MCSD) divergence is presented by aggregating the absolute margin violations in multi-class classification, and this proposed MCSD is able to fully characterize the relations between any pair of multi-class scoring hypotheses. By using MCSD as a measure of domain distance, we develop a new domain adaptation bound for multi-class UDA; its data-dependent, probably approximately correct bound is also developed that naturally suggests adversarial learning objectives to align conditional feature distributions across source and target domains. Consequently, an algorithmic framework of Multi-class Domain-adversarial learning Networks (McDalNets) is developed, and its different instantiations via surrogate learning objectives either coincide with or resemble a few recently popular methods, thus (partially) underscoring their practical effectiveness. Based on our identical theory for multi-class UDA, we also introduce a new algorithm of Domain-Symmetric Networks (SymmNets), which is featured by a novel adversarial strategy of domain confusion and discrimination. SymmNets affords simple extensions that work equally well under the problem settings of either closed set, partial, or open set UDA. We conduct careful empirical studies to compare different algorithms of McDalNets and our newly introduced SymmNets. Experiments verify our theoretical analysis and show the efficacy of our proposed SymmNets. In addition, we have made our implementation code publicly available.
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to leverage the knowledge learned from a labeled source dataset to solve similar tasks in a new unlabeled domain. Prior UDA methods typically require to access the source data when learning to adapt the model, making them risky and inefficient for decentralized private data. This work tackles a practical setting where only a trained source model is available and investigates how we can effectively utilize such a model without source data to solve UDA problems. We propose a simple yet generic representation learning framework, named \emph{Source HypOthesis Transfer} (SHOT). SHOT freezes the classifier module (hypothesis) of the source model and learns the target-specific feature extraction module by exploiting both information maximization and self-supervised pseudo-labeling to implicitly align representations from the target domains to the source hypothesis. To verify its versatility, we evaluate SHOT in a variety of adaptation cases including closed-set, partial-set, and open-set domain adaptation. Experiments indicate that SHOT yields state-of-the-art results among multiple domain adaptation benchmarks.
Domain shift is a fundamental problem in visual recognition which typically arises when the source and target data follow different distributions. The existing domain adaptation approaches which tackle this problem work in the closed-set setting with the assumption that the source and the target data share exactly the same classes of objects. In this paper, we tackle a more realistic problem of open-set domain shift where the target data contains additional classes that are not present in the source data. More specifically, we introduce an end-to-end Progressive Graph Learning (PGL) framework where a graph neural network with episodic training is integrated to suppress underlying conditional shift and adversarial learning is adopted to close the gap between the source and target distributions. Compared to the existing open-set adaptation approaches, our approach guarantees to achieve a tighter upper bound of the target error. Extensive experiments on three standard open-set benchmarks evidence that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts in open-set domain adaptation.
Accurate segmentation of the prostate from magnetic resonance (MR) images provides useful information for prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment. However, automated prostate segmentation from 3D MR images still faces several challenges. For instance, a lack of clear edge between the prostate and other anatomical structures makes it challenging to accurately extract the boundaries. The complex background texture and large variation in size, shape and intensity distribution of the prostate itself make segmentation even further complicated. With deep learning, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), emerging as commonly used methods for medical image segmentation, the difficulty in obtaining large number of annotated medical images for training CNNs has become much more pronounced that ever before. Since large-scale dataset is one of the critical components for the success of deep learning, lack of sufficient training data makes it difficult to fully train complex CNNs. To tackle the above challenges, in this paper, we propose a boundary-weighted domain adaptive neural network (BOWDA-Net). To make the network more sensitive to the boundaries during segmentation, a boundary-weighted segmentation loss (BWL) is proposed. Furthermore, an advanced boundary-weighted transfer leaning approach is introduced to address the problem of small medical imaging datasets. We evaluate our proposed model on the publicly available MICCAI 2012 Prostate MR Image Segmentation (PROMISE12) challenge dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model is more sensitive to boundary information and outperformed other state-of-the-art methods.
We propose a novel attention gate (AG) model for medical imaging that automatically learns to focus on target structures of varying shapes and sizes. Models trained with AGs implicitly learn to suppress irrelevant regions in an input image while highlighting salient features useful for a specific task. This enables us to eliminate the necessity of using explicit external tissue/organ localisation modules of cascaded convolutional neural networks (CNNs). AGs can be easily integrated into standard CNN architectures such as the U-Net model with minimal computational overhead while increasing the model sensitivity and prediction accuracy. The proposed Attention U-Net architecture is evaluated on two large CT abdominal datasets for multi-class image segmentation. Experimental results show that AGs consistently improve the prediction performance of U-Net across different datasets and training sizes while preserving computational efficiency. The code for the proposed architecture is publicly available.
Recent works showed that Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be successfully applied in unsupervised domain adaptation, where, given a labeled source dataset and an unlabeled target dataset, the goal is to train powerful classifiers for the target samples. In particular, it was shown that a GAN objective function can be used to learn target features indistinguishable from the source ones. In this work, we extend this framework by (i) forcing the learned feature extractor to be domain-invariant, and (ii) training it through data augmentation in the feature space, namely performing feature augmentation. While data augmentation in the image space is a well established technique in deep learning, feature augmentation has not yet received the same level of attention. We accomplish it by means of a feature generator trained by playing the GAN minimax game against source features. Results show that both enforcing domain-invariance and performing feature augmentation lead to superior or comparable performance to state-of-the-art results in several unsupervised domain adaptation benchmarks.
Convolutional networks (ConvNets) have achieved great successes in various challenging vision tasks. However, the performance of ConvNets would degrade when encountering the domain shift. The domain adaptation is more significant while challenging in the field of biomedical image analysis, where cross-modality data have largely different distributions. Given that annotating the medical data is especially expensive, the supervised transfer learning approaches are not quite optimal. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation framework with adversarial learning for cross-modality biomedical image segmentations. Specifically, our model is based on a dilated fully convolutional network for pixel-wise prediction. Moreover, we build a plug-and-play domain adaptation module (DAM) to map the target input to features which are aligned with source domain feature space. A domain critic module (DCM) is set up for discriminating the feature space of both domains. We optimize the DAM and DCM via an adversarial loss without using any target domain label. Our proposed method is validated by adapting a ConvNet trained with MRI images to unpaired CT data for cardiac structures segmentations, and achieved very promising results.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.
Machine translation is a popular test bed for research in neural sequence-to-sequence models but despite much recent research, there is still a lack of understanding of these models. Practitioners report performance degradation with large beams, the under-estimation of rare words and a lack of diversity in the final translations. Our study relates some of these issues to the inherent uncertainty of the task, due to the existence of multiple valid translations for a single source sentence, and to the extrinsic uncertainty caused by noisy training data. We propose tools and metrics to assess how uncertainty in the data is captured by the model distribution and how it affects search strategies that generate translations. Our results show that search works remarkably well but that the models tend to spread too much probability mass over the hypothesis space. Next, we propose tools to assess model calibration and show how to easily fix some shortcomings of current models. We release both code and multiple human reference translations for two popular benchmarks.