Domain-Invariant Mixed-Domain Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Clustered Maximum Mean Discrepancy Alignment

View at publisher
Authors: Ba-Thinh Lam, Thanh-Huy Nguyen, Hoang-Thien Nguyen, Quang-Khai Bui-Tran, Nguyen Lan Vi Vu, Phat K. Huynh, Ulas Bagci, Min Xu
Cited by: 1
References: 15

Abstract

Deep learning has shown remarkable progress in medical image semantic segmentation, yet its success heavily depends on large-scale expert annotations and consistent data distributions. In practice, annotations are scarce and images are collected from multiple scanners or centers, leading to mixed-domain settings with unknown domain labels and severe domain gaps. Existing semi-supervised or domain adaptation approaches typically assume either a single domain shift or access to explicit domain indices, which rarely hold in real-world deployment. In this paper, we propose a domain-invariant mixed-domain semi-supervised segmentation framework that jointly enhances data diversity and mitigates domain bias. A Copy-Paste Mechanism (CPM) augments the training set by transferring informative regions across domains, while a Cluster Maximum Mean Discrepancy (CMMD) block clusters unlabeled features and aligns them with labeled anchors via an MMD objective, encouraging domain-invariant representations. Integrated within a teacher–student framework, our method achieves robust and precise segmentation even with very few labeled examples and multiple unknown domain discrepancies. Experiments on Fundus and M&Ms benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently surpasses semi-supervised and domain adaptation methods, establishing a potential solution for mixed-domain semi-supervised medical image segmentation.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Medical Image Segmentation Techniques Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning Advanced Neural Network Applications

Publication details

Journal / source
ICASSP 2026 - 2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
Publisher
IEEE
Pages
7662–7666
Publication date
21 April 2026