# SynSeg-Net: Synthetic Segmentation Without Target Modality Ground Truth

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.06498 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06498/

## Key facts

- Cited by 68 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Oct 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [SynthSeg: Segmentation of brain MRI scans of any contrast and resolution without retraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09559/) (2021)
- [MAISI: Medical AI for Synthetic Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11169/) (2024)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptive Fundus Image Segmentation with Denoised Pseudo-Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09735/) (2021)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03152/) (2021)
- [Efficient Medical Image Segmentation Based on Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09987/) (2021)
- [Deep Symmetric Adaptation Network for Cross-modality Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06853/) (2021)
- [Can segmentation models be trained with fully synthetically generated data?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08256/) (2022)
- [Towards Generic Semi-Supervised Framework for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11320/) (2023)
- [DLTTA: Dynamic Learning Rate for Test-time Adaptation on Cross-domain Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13723/) (2022)
- [LE-UDA: Label-efficient unsupervised domain adaptation for medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02078/) (2022)
- [Deep learning for unsupervised domain adaptation in medical imaging: Recent advancements and future perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01265/) (2023)
- [Source-free unsupervised domain adaptation for cross-modality abdominal multi-organ segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12221/) (2021)
- [COSMOS: Cross-Modality Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Medical Image Segmentation based on Target-aware Domain Translation and Iterative Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16557/) (2022)
- [AnyStar: Domain randomized universal star-convex 3D instance segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07044/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Model Adaptation for Source-free Segmentation of Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00807/) (2022)
- [Domain Adaptation for the Segmentation of Confidential Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00522/) (2021)
- [Toward Unpaired Multi-modal Medical Image Segmentation via Learning Structured Semantic Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10571/) (2022)
- [Reducing Domain Gap in Frequency and Spatial domain for Cross-modality Domain Adaptation on Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15235/) (2022)
- [SDC-UDA: Volumetric Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Framework for Slice-Direction Continuous Cross-Modality Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11012/) (2023)
- [Anatomy-Constrained Contrastive Learning for Synthetic Segmentation without Ground-truth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05482/) (2021)
- [Dual-Teacher++: Exploiting Intra-domain and Inter-domain Knowledge with Reliable Transfer for Cardiac Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02375/) (2021)
- [Online Reflective Learning for Robust Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00476/) (2022)
- [Recent Advances in Medical Imaging Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09274/) (2025)
- [Cross-Modality Neuroimage Synthesis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06997/) (2022)
- [ASC: Appearance and Structure Consistency for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Fetal Brain MRI Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14172/) (2023)
- [MouseGAN++: Unsupervised Disentanglement and Contrastive Representation for Multiple MRI Modalities Synthesis and Structural Segmentation of Mouse Brain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01825/) (2022)
- [Cross-modal tumor segmentation using generative blending augmentation and self training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01705/) (2023)
- [Reconstruction-driven Dynamic Refinement based Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Joint Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04581/) (2023)
- [A Data Augmentation Pipeline to Generate Synthetic Labeled Datasets of 3D Echocardiography Images using a GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05384/) (2024)
- [Diffuse-UDA: Addressing Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Medical Image Segmentation with Appearance and Structure Aligned Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05985/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A key limitation of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) based image segmentation methods is the lack of generalizability. Manually traced training images are typically required when segmenting organs in a new imaging modality or from distinct disease cohort. The manual efforts can be alleviated if the manually traced images in one imaging modality (e.g., MRI) are able to train a segmentation network for another imaging modality (e.g., CT). In this paper, we propose an end-to-end synthetic segmentation network (SynSeg-Net) to train a segmentation network for a target imaging modality without having manual labels. SynSeg-Net is trained by using (1) unpaired intensity images from source and target modalities, and (2) manual labels only from source modality. SynSeg-Net is enabled by the recent advances of cycle generative adversarial networks (CycleGAN) and DCNN. We evaluate the performance of the SynSeg-Net on two experiments: (1) MRI to CT splenomegaly synthetic segmentation for abdominal images, and (2) CT to MRI total intracranial volume synthetic segmentation (TICV) for brain images. The proposed end-to-end approach achieved superior performance to two stage methods. Moreover, the SynSeg-Net achieved comparable performance to the traditional segmentation network using target modality labels in certain scenarios. The source code of SynSeg-Net is publicly available (https://github.com/MASILab/SynSeg-Net).