# Adapting Off-the-Shelf Source Segmenter for Target Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.12497 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12497/

## Key facts

- Cited by 39 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Confidence Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09822/) (2019)
- [Two at Once: Enhancing Learning and Generalization Capacities via IBN-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09441/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Unsupervised Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02849/) (2018)
- [Characterizing and Avoiding Negative Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09751/) (2018)
- [Domain-Specific Batch Normalization for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03950/) (2019)
- [Synergistic Image and Feature Adaptation: Towards Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08211/) (2019)
- [AutoDIAL: Automatic DomaIn Alignment Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08082/) (2017)
- [Tent: Fully Test-time Adaptation by Entropy Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10726/) (2020)
- [Source-Relaxed Domain Adaptation for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03697/) (2020)
- [Boosting Domain Adaptation by Discovering Latent Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01386/) (2018)
- [A Unified Conditional Disentanglement Framework for Multimodal Brain MR Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05434/) (2021)
- [Subtype-aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Medical Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00318/) (2021)
- [Energy-constrained Self-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00316/) (2021)
- [Normalization in Training U-Net for 2D Biomedical Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03783/) (2018)
- [Unimodal-uniform Constrained Wasserstein Training for Medical Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02475/) (2019)
- [Dual-cycle Constrained Bijective VAE-GAN For Tagged-to-Cine Magnetic Resonance Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05439/) (2021)
- [Symmetric-Constrained Irregular Structure Inpainting for Brain MRI Registration with Tumor Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06775/) (2021)

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

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [Deep Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: A Review of Recent Advances and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07422/) (2022)
- [Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00265/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Conditional and Label Shift: Infer, Align and Iterate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13469/) (2021)
- [Joint Learning of Label and Environment Causal Independence for Graph Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01103/) (2023)
- [DLTTA: Dynamic Learning Rate for Test-time Adaptation on Cross-domain Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13723/) (2022)
- [Deep learning for unsupervised domain adaptation in medical imaging: Recent advancements and future perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01265/) (2023)
- [FVP: Fourier Visual Prompting for Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13672/) (2023)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptive Fundus Image Segmentation with Class-Balanced Mean Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09973/) (2023)
- [UPL-SFDA: Uncertainty-aware Pseudo Label Guided Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10244/) (2023)
- [ACT: Semi-supervised Domain-adaptive Medical Image Segmentation with Asymmetric Co-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02288/) (2022)
- [ProSFDA: Prompt Learning based Source-free Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11514/) (2022)
- [Active Test-Time Adaptation: Theoretical Analyses and An Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05094/) (2024)
- [Memory Consistent Unsupervised Off-the-Shelf Model Adaptation for Source-Relaxed Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07910/) (2022)
- [Recursively Conditional Gaussian for Ordinal Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13467/) (2021)
- [Self-semantic contour adaptation for cross modality brain tumor segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05022/) (2022)
- [Anatomy-guided domain adaptation for 3D in-bed human pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12193/) (2022)
- [Incremental Learning for Heterogeneous Structure Segmentation in Brain Tumor MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19404/) (2023)
- [Medical Image Segmentation with InTEnt: Integrated Entropy Weighting for Single Image Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09604/) (2024)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation of Weakly-Supervised Object Localization Models for Histology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19113/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Segmentation with Black-box Source Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07769/) (2022)
- [Context-Aware Pseudo-Label Refinement for Source-Free Domain Adaptive Fundus Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07731/) (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)
- [Variational Inference for Quantifying Inter-observer Variability in Segmentation of Anatomical Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07106/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Segment Anything Model for Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Dual Feature Guided Auto-Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08527/) (2025)
- [MS Lesion Segmentation: Revisiting Weighting Mechanisms for Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01509/) (2022)
- [Soft-CP: A Credible and Effective Data Augmentation for Semantic Segmentation of Medical Lesions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10507/) (2022)
- [Exploring Generalizable Distillation for Efficient Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12995/) (2022)
- [Subtype-Aware Dynamic Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07754/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled and unseen target domain, which is usually trained on data from both domains. Access to the source domain data at the adaptation stage, however, is often limited, due to data storage or privacy issues. To alleviate this, in this work, we target source free UDA for segmentation, and propose to adapt an ``off-the-shelf" segmentation model pre-trained in the source domain to the target domain, with an adaptive batch-wise normalization statistics adaptation framework. Specifically, the domain-specific low-order batch statistics, i.e., mean and variance, are gradually adapted with an exponential momentum decay scheme, while the consistency of domain shareable high-order batch statistics, i.e., scaling and shifting parameters, is explicitly enforced by our optimization objective. The transferability of each channel is adaptively measured first from which to balance the contribution of each channel. Moreover, the proposed source free UDA framework is orthogonal to unsupervised learning methods, e.g., self-entropy minimization, which can thus be simply added on top of our framework. Extensive experiments on the BraTS 2018 database show that our source free UDA framework outperformed existing source-relaxed UDA methods for the cross-subtype UDA segmentation task and yielded comparable results for the cross-modality UDA segmentation task, compared with a supervised UDA methods with the source data.