# Deep Symmetric Adaptation Network for Cross-modality Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06853 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06853/

## Key facts

- Cited by 39 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [Domain Separation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06019/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Pixel-Level Domain Adaptation with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05424/) (2016)
- [Bidirectional Learning for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10620/) (2019)
- [Taking A Closer Look at Domain Shift: Category-level Adversaries for Semantics Consistent Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09478/) (2018)
- [Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07828/) (2016)
- [Simultaneous Deep Transfer Across Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.02192/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Bidirectional Cross-Modality Adaptation via Deeply Synergistic Image and Feature Alignment for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02255/) (2020)
- [Synergistic Image and Feature Adaptation: Towards Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08211/) (2019)
- [No More Discrimination: Cross City Adaptation of Road Scene Segmenters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08509/) (2017)
- [All about Structure: Adapting Structural Information across Domains for Boosting Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12212/) (2019)
- [DADA: Depth-aware Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01886/) (2019)
- [ROAD: Reality Oriented Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11556/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Adaptation Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08286/) (2018)
- [SynSeg-Net: Synthetic Segmentation Without Target Modality Ground Truth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06498/) (2018)
- [Boosting Domain Adaptation by Discovering Latent Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01386/) (2018)
- [Effective Use of Synthetic Data for Urban Scene Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06132/) (2018)
- [Penalizing Top Performers: Conservative Loss for Semantic Segmentation Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00903/) (2018)
- [XGAN: Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation for Many-to-Many Mappings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05139/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [GAMMA Challenge:Glaucoma grAding from Multi-Modality imAges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06511/) (2022)
- [Towards Generic Semi-Supervised Framework for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11320/) (2023)
- [Deep learning for unsupervised domain adaptation in medical imaging: Recent advancements and future perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01265/) (2023)
- [GraphEcho: Graph-Driven Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Echocardiogram Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11145/) (2023)
- [ACT: Semi-supervised Domain-adaptive Medical Image Segmentation with Asymmetric Co-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02288/) (2022)
- [Data synthesis and adversarial networks: A review and meta-analysis in cancer imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09543/) (2021)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation via Prototype-Anchored Feature Alignment and Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09769/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Model Adaptation for Source-free Segmentation of Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00807/) (2022)
- [SDC-UDA: Volumetric Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Framework for Slice-Direction Continuous Cross-Modality Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11012/) (2023)
- [FPL+: Filtered Pseudo Label-based Unsupervised Cross-Modality Adaptation for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04971/) (2024)
- [Better Pseudo-label: Joint Domain-aware Label and Dual-classifier for Semi-supervised Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04820/) (2021)
- [Self-semantic contour adaptation for cross modality brain tumor segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05022/) (2022)
- [Explainable, Domain-Adaptive, and Federated Artificial Intelligence in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09317/) (2022)
- [Semi-supervised Domain Adaptive Medical Image Segmentation through Consistency Regularized Disentangled Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02798/) (2023)
- [ASC: Appearance and Structure Consistency for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Fetal Brain MRI Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14172/) (2023)
- [Medical Image Segmentation via Single-Source Domain Generalization with Random Amplitude Spectrum Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04768/) (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)
- [Mind The Gap: Alleviating Local Imbalance for Unsupervised Cross-Modality Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11888/) (2022)
- [How precise are performance estimates for typical medical image segmentation tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14677/) (2022)
- [Medical Image Segmentation with Domain Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01702/) (2023)
- [An Uncertainty-guided Tiered Self-training Framework for Active Source-free Domain Adaptation in Prostate Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02893/) (2024)
- [Navigating Distribution Shifts in Medical Image Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05824/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Adaptive Cellular Recognition Under Domain Shifts: A Contextual Correspondence View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12870/) (2024)
- [SRPL-SFDA: SAM-Guided Reliable Pseudo-Labels for Source-Free Domain Adaptation in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09403/) (2025)
- [Exploring Generalizable Distillation for Efficient Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12995/) (2022)
- [Modality Bank: Learn multi-modality images across data centers without sharing medical data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08955/) (2022)
- [S&D Messenger: Exchanging Semantic and Domain Knowledge for Generic Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07763/) (2024)
- [Cross-Domain Distribution Alignment for Segmentation of Private Unannotated 3D Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09210/) (2024)
- [M3DA: Benchmark for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17029/) (2025)
- [Bridging the Inter-Domain Gap through Low-Level Features for Cross-Modal Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11909/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods have shown their promising performance in the cross-modality medical image segmentation tasks. These typical methods usually utilize a translation network to transform images from the source domain to target domain or train the pixel-level classifier merely using translated source images and original target images. However, when there exists a large domain shift between source and target domains, we argue that this asymmetric structure could not fully eliminate the domain gap. In this paper, we present a novel deep symmetric architecture of UDA for medical image segmentation, which consists of a segmentation sub-network, and two symmetric source and target domain translation sub-networks. To be specific, based on two translation sub-networks, we introduce a bidirectional alignment scheme via a shared encoder and private decoders to simultaneously align features 1) from source to target domain and 2) from target to source domain, which helps effectively mitigate the discrepancy between domains. Furthermore, for the segmentation sub-network, we train a pixel-level classifier using not only original target images and translated source images, but also original source images and translated target images, which helps sufficiently leverage the semantic information from the images with different styles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method has remarkable advantages compared to the state-of-the-art methods in both cross-modality Cardiac and BraTS segmentation tasks.