Domain adaptation using AdaBN and AdaIN for high-resolution IVD mesh reconstruction from clinical MRI

Purpose: Deep learning has firmly established its dominance in medical imaging applications. However, careful consideration must be exercised when transitioning a trained source model to adapt to an entirely distinct environment that deviates significantly from the training set. The majority of the efforts to mitigate this issue have predominantly focused on classification and segmentation tasks. In this work, we perform a domain adaptation of a trained source model to reconstruct high-resolution intervertebral disc meshes from low-resolution MRI.

Methods: To address the outlined challenges, we use MRI2Mesh as the shape reconstruction network. It incorporates three major modules: image encoder, mesh deformation, and cross-level feature fusion. This feature fusion module is used to encapsulate local and global disc features. We evaluate two major domain adaptation techniques: adaptive batch normalization (AdaBN) and adaptive instance normalization (AdaIN) for the task of shape reconstruction.

Results: Experiments conducted on distinct datasets, including data from different populations, machines, and test sites demonstrate the effectiveness of MRI2Mesh for domain adaptation. MRI2Mesh achieved up to a 14% decrease in Hausdorff distance (HD) and a 19% decrease in the point-to-surface (P2S) metric for both AdaBN and AdaIN experiments, indicating improved performance.

Conclusion: MRI2Mesh has demonstrated consistent superiority to the state-of-the-art Voxel2Mesh network across a diverse range of datasets, populations, and scanning protocols, highlighting its versatility. Additionally, AdaBN has emerged as a robust method compared to the AdaIN technique. Further experiments show that MRI2Mesh, when combined with AdaBN, holds immense promise for enhancing the precision of anatomical shape reconstruction in domain adaptation.