# Invariant Content Synergistic Learning for Domain Generalization of Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.02845 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02845/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [Domain Generalization by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06864/) (2019)
- [A Fourier-based Framework for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11120/) (2021)
- [FedDG: Federated Domain Generalization on Medical Image Segmentation via Episodic Learning in Continuous Frequency Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06030/) (2021)
- [Deep Domain-Adversarial Image Generation for Domain Generalisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06054/) (2020)
- [Shape-aware Meta-learning for Generalizing Prostate MRI Segmentation to Unseen Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02035/) (2020)
- [DoFE: Domain-oriented Feature Embedding for Generalizable Fundus Image Segmentation on Unseen Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06208/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation of ConvNets for Biomedical Image Segmentations with Adversarial Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10916/) (2018)
- [Task Driven Generative Modeling for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: Application to X-ray Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07201/) (2018)
- [Patch-based Output Space Adversarial Learning for Joint Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07519/) (2019)
- [Semi-supervised Meta-learning with Disentanglement for Domain-generalised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13292/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Dual-Task Synergy-Driven Generalization Framework for Pancreatic Cancer Segmentation in CT Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01644/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While achieving remarkable success for medical image segmentation, deep convolution neural networks (DCNNs) often fail to maintain their robustness when confronting test data with the novel distribution. To address such a drawback, the inductive bias of DCNNs is recently well-recognized. Specifically, DCNNs exhibit an inductive bias towards image style (e.g., superficial texture) rather than invariant content (e.g., object shapes). In this paper, we propose a method, named Invariant Content Synergistic Learning (ICSL), to improve the generalization ability of DCNNs on unseen datasets by controlling the inductive bias. First, ICSL mixes the style of training instances to perturb the training distribution. That is to say, more diverse domains or styles would be made available for training DCNNs. Based on the perturbed distribution, we carefully design a dual-branches invariant content synergistic learning strategy to prevent style-biased predictions and focus more on the invariant content. Extensive experimental results on two typical medical image segmentation tasks show that our approach performs better than state-of-the-art domain generalization methods.