# Rethinking Data Augmentation for Single-source Domain Generalization in Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.14805 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14805/

## Key facts

- Cited by 45 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [Self-Challenging Improves Cross-Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02454/) (2020)
- [Medical Transformer: Gated Axial-Attention for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10662/) (2021)
- [CHAOS Challenge -- Combined (CT-MR) Healthy Abdominal Organ Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06535/) (2020)
- [Puzzle Mix: Exploiting Saliency and Local Statistics for Optimal Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06962/) (2020)
- [ClassMix: Segmentation-Based Data Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07936/) (2020)
- [Object Region Mining with Adversarial Erasing: A Simple Classification to Semantic Segmentation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08448/) (2017)
- [Models Genesis: Generic Autodidactic Models for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06912/) (2019)
- [Robust and Generalizable Visual Representation Learning via Random Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13003/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervision with Superpixels: Training Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation without Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09886/) (2020)
- [Synergistic Image and Feature Adaptation: Towards Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08211/) (2019)
- [Causality-inspired Single-source Domain Generalization for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12525/) (2021)
- [Generalizing to unseen domains via distribution matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00804/) (2019)
- [DoFE: Domain-oriented Feature Embedding for Generalizable Fundus Image Segmentation on Unseen Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06208/) (2020)
- [Generalizable Cross-modality Medical Image Segmentation via Style Augmentation and Dual Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11177/) (2021)
- [Realistic Adversarial Data Augmentation for MR Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13322/) (2020)
- [Cardiac Segmentation on Late Gadolinium Enhancement MRI: A Benchmark Study from Multi-Sequence Cardiac MR Segmentation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12434/) (2020)
- [ObjectAug: Object-level Data Augmentation for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00221/) (2021)
- [Mask-based Data Augmentation for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10156/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Domain Generalization for Medical Image Analysis: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08598/) (2023)
- [Artificial General Intelligence for Medical Imaging Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05480/) (2023)
- [Devil is in Channels: Contrastive Single Domain Generalization for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05254/) (2023)
- [Single Domain Generalization for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09124/) (2024)
- [Neural oscillators for generalization of physics-informed machine learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08989/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Domain Generalization for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05035/) (2024)
- [MoreStyle: Relax Low-frequency Constraint of Fourier-based Image Reconstruction in Generalizable Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11689/) (2024)
- [Prompting Segment Anything Model with Domain-Adaptive Prototype for Generalizable Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12522/) (2024)
- [EviPrompt: A Training-Free Evidential Prompt Generation Method for Segment Anything Model in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06400/) (2023)
- [Medical Image Segmentation via Single-Source Domain Generalization with Random Amplitude Spectrum Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04768/) (2024)
- [RobustEMD: Domain Robust Matching for Cross-domain Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01110/) (2024)
- [The Devil is in the Statistics: Mitigating and Exploiting Statistics Difference for Generalizable Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11356/) (2024)
- [Generalizable Single-Source Cross-modality Medical Image Segmentation via Invariant Causal Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05223/) (2024)
- [Navigating Distribution Shifts in Medical Image Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05824/) (2024)
- [CoSAM: Self-Correcting SAM for Domain Generalization in 2D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10136/) (2024)
- [A-Eval: A Benchmark for Cross-Dataset Evaluation of Abdominal Multi-Organ Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03906/) (2023)
- [Mixture-of-Shape-Experts (MoSE): End-to-End Shape Dictionary Framework to Prompt SAM for Generalizable Medical Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09601/) (2025)
- [RaffeSDG: Random Frequency Filtering enabled Single-source Domain Generalization for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01228/) (2024)
- [MRGen: Segmentation Data Engine for Underrepresented MRI Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04106/) (2024)
- [Towards contrast-agnostic soft segmentation of the spinal cord](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15402/) (2023)
- [Language Guided Domain Generalized Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01272/) (2024)
- [FIESTA: Fourier-Based Semantic Augmentation with Uncertainty Guidance for Enhanced Domain Generalizability in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14308/) (2024)
- [Let Synthetic Data Shine: Domain Reassembly and Soft-Fusion for Single Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13617/) (2025)
- [A Dual-Task Synergy-Driven Generalization Framework for Pancreatic Cancer Segmentation in CT Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01644/) (2025)
- [Leveraging SAM for Single-Source Domain Generalization in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02076/) (2024)
- [ConDiSR: Contrastive Disentanglement and Style Regularization for Single Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09400/) (2024)
- [Task-Specific Knowledge Distillation from the Vision Foundation Model for Enhanced Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06976/) (2025)
- [Single Domain Generalization for Multimodal Cross-Cancer Prognosis via Dirac Rebalancer and Distribution Entanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08340/) (2025)
- [Fully Automated SAM for Single-source Domain Generalization in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17281/) (2025)
- [Dual-supervised Asymmetric Co-training for Semi-supervised Medical Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20785/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Single-source domain generalization (SDG) in medical image segmentation is a challenging yet essential task as domain shifts are quite common among clinical image datasets. Previous attempts most conduct global-only/random augmentation. Their augmented samples are usually insufficient in diversity and informativeness, thus failing to cover the possible target domain distribution. In this paper, we rethink the data augmentation strategy for SDG in medical image segmentation. Motivated by the class-level representation invariance and style mutability of medical images, we hypothesize that unseen target data can be sampled from a linear combination of C (the class number) random variables, where each variable follows a location-scale distribution at the class level. Accordingly, data augmented can be readily made by sampling the random variables through a general form. On the empirical front, we implement such strategy with constrained Bacuterm ezier transformation on both global and local (i.e. class-level) regions, which can largely increase the augmentation diversity. A Saliency-balancing Fusion mechanism is further proposed to enrich the informativeness by engaging the gradient information, guiding augmentation with proper orientation and magnitude. As an important contribution, we prove theoretically that our proposed augmentation can lead to an upper bound of the generalization risk on the unseen target domain, thus confirming our hypothesis. Combining the two strategies, our Saliency-balancing Location-scale Augmentation (SLAug) exceeds the state-of-the-art works by a large margin in two challenging SDG tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Kaiseem/SLAug .