ACL-Net: Adaptive and Collaborative Learning Network for Multi-Site Prostate MRI Segmentation

High-performance deep learning models require large amounts of data with high quality annotations for model training, while the labeling work usually takes a lot of time for the experts. Meanwhile, the inter-observer variability al-ways exist between annotations from different experts and the distribution shift between the data acquired from different medical institutions. To address these challenges, we propose an end-to-end domain adaptive collaborative learning network for multi-institutional prostate MRI segmentation. Specifically, we introduce an unpaired image translation module to match the image domains between different institutions, which can alleviate the heterogeneity between 1.5T and 3T prostate MR images during model training. Moreover, we design a self-taught strategy to transfer domain-aware knowledge to jointly learn generic and unique representations. Furthermore, we evaluate our approach in scenarios with limited or without annotations, experimental results show that our approach has better adaptation performance than traditional supervised learning approaches, and has the potential to extend to unsupervised domain adaptation scenario. We also evaluate our approach with prostate MRI segmentation benchmark datasets, experimental results show that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.