Liver Segmentation in CT with MRI Data: Zero-Shot Domain Adaptation by Contour Extraction and Shape Priors

In this work we address the problem of domain adaptation for segmentation tasks with deep convolutional neural networks. We focus on managing the domain shift from MRI to CT volumes on the example of 3D liver segmentation. Domain adaptation between modalities is particularly of practical importance, as different hospital departments usually tend to use different imaging modalities and protocols in their clinical routine. Thus, training a model with source data from one department may not be sufficient for application in another institution. Most adaptation strategies make use of target domain samples and often additionally incorporate the corresponding ground truths from the target domain during the training process. In contrast to these approaches, we investigate the possibility of training our model solely on source domain data sets, i.e. we apply zero-shot domain adaptation. To compensate the missing target domain data, we use prior knowledge about both modalities to steer the model towards more general features during the training process. We particularly make use of fixed Sobel kernels to enhance contour information and apply anatomical priors, learned separately by a convolutional autoencoder. Although we completely discard including the target domain in the training process, our proposed approach improves a vanilla U-Net implementation drastically and yields promising segmentation results.