Modality-Agnostic Learning for Medical Image Segmentation Using Multi-Modality Self-Distillation

In medical image segmentation, although multi-modality training is possible, clinical translation is challenged by the limited availability of all image types for a given patient. Different from typical segmentation models, modality-agnostic (MAG) learning trains a single model based on all available modalities but remains input-agnostic, allowing a single model to produce accurate segmentation given any modality combinations. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, MAG learning through Multi-modality Self-distillation (MAG-MS), for medical image segmentation. MAG-MS distills knowledge from the fusion of multiple modalities and applies it to enhance representation learning for individual modalities. This makes it an adaptable and efficient solution for handling limited modalities during testing scenarios. Our extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate its superior segmentation accuracy, MAG robustness, and efficiency than the current state-of-the-art methods.