# SDC-UDA: Volumetric Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Framework for Slice-Direction Continuous Cross-Modality Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11012 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11012/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Pre-training and Self-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06882/) (2020)
- [CHAOS Challenge -- Combined (CT-MR) Healthy Abdominal Organ Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06535/) (2020)
- [Bidirectional Learning for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10620/) (2019)
- [PseudoSeg: Designing Pseudo Labels for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09713/) (2020)
- [Learning Texture Invariant Representation for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00867/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Translating and Segmenting Multimodal Medical Volumes with Cycle- and Shape-Consistency Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09655/) (2018)
- [SynSeg-Net: Synthetic Segmentation Without Target Modality Ground Truth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06498/) (2018)
- [CrossMoDA 2021 challenge: Benchmark of Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation techniques for Vestibular Schwannoma and Cochlea Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02831/) (2022)
- [A Closer Look at Self-training for Zero-Label Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11692/) (2021)
- [Deep Symmetric Adaptation Network for Cross-modality Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06853/) (2021)
- [Scribble-based Domain Adaptation via Co-segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03632/) (2020)
- [Improving Semantic Segmentation via Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14960/) (2020)
- [Self-Attentive Spatial Adaptive Normalization for Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03781/) (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)
- [Pseudo-label refinement using superpixels for semi-supervised brain tumour segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08589/) (2021)
- [PSIGAN: Joint probabilistic segmentation and image distribution matching for unpaired cross-modality adaptation based MRI segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09465/) (2020)
- [Target and Task specific Source-Free Domain Adaptive Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15792/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [False Negative/Positive Control for SAM on Noisy Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10382/) (2023)
- [Prompting Segment Anything Model with Domain-Adaptive Prototype for Generalizable Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12522/) (2024)
- [DAWN: Domain-Adaptive Weakly Supervised Nuclei Segmentation via Cross-Task Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14956/) (2024)
- [Steady Progress Beats Stagnation: Mutual Aid of Foundation and Conventional Models in Mixed Domain Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16997/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Adaptive Cellular Recognition Under Domain Shifts: A Contextual Correspondence View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12870/) (2024)
- [DRL-STNet: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Cross-modality Medical Image Segmentation via Disentangled Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18340/) (2024)
- [FIESTA: Fourier-Based Semantic Augmentation with Uncertainty Guidance for Enhanced Domain Generalizability in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14308/) (2024)
- [Training-free image style alignment for self-adapting domain shift on handheld ultrasound devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11211/) (2024)
- [Vox-UDA: Voxel-wise Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Cryo-Electron Subtomogram Segmentation with Denoised Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18610/) (2024)
- [Temporal Prompting Matters: Rethinking Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07319/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in deep learning-based medical image segmentation studies achieve nearly human-level performance in fully supervised manner. However, acquiring pixel-level expert annotations is extremely expensive and laborious in medical imaging fields. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) can alleviate this problem, which makes it possible to use annotated data in one imaging modality to train a network that can successfully perform segmentation on target imaging modality with no labels. In this work, we propose SDC-UDA, a simple yet effective volumetric UDA framework for slice-direction continuous cross-modality medical image segmentation which combines intra- and inter-slice self-attentive image translation, uncertainty-constrained pseudo-label refinement, and volumetric self-training. Our method is distinguished from previous methods on UDA for medical image segmentation in that it can obtain continuous segmentation in the slice direction, thereby ensuring higher accuracy and potential in clinical practice. We validate SDC-UDA with multiple publicly available cross-modality medical image segmentation datasets and achieve state-of-the-art segmentation performance, not to mention the superior slice-direction continuity of prediction compared to previous studies.