mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Domain Generalization for Medical Image Analysis: A Review

arXiv 2310.08598 ↗First posted 5 Oct 2023eess.IV cs.AI cs.CVcited by 47

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Abstract (arXiv)

Medical image analysis (MedIA) has become an essential tool in medicine and healthcare, aiding in disease diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment planning, and recent successes in deep learning (DL) have made significant contributions to its advances. However, deploying DL models for MedIA in real-world situations remains challenging due to their failure to generalize across the distributional gap between training and testing samples - a problem known as domain shift. Researchers have dedicated their efforts to developing various DL methods to adapt and perform robustly on unknown and out-of-distribution (OOD) data distributions. This article comprehensively reviews domain generalization (DG) studies specifically tailored for MedIA. We provide a holistic view of how DG techniques interact within the broader MedIA system, going beyond methodologies to consider the operational implications on the entire MedIA workflow. Specifically, we categorize DG methods into data-level, feature-level, model-level, and analysis-level methods. We show how those methods can be used in various stages of the MedIA workflow with DL equipped from data acquisition to model prediction and analysis. Furthermore, we critically analyze the strengths and weaknesses of various methods, unveiling future research opportunities.

Key facts. Cited by 47 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 98 of its 178 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2023.

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98 of 178 references.

References · 98

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38 more
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  5. 2021Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Analysis: A Surveycited by 351
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 4; 2025: 19; 2026: 24.

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  1. 2025Towards Generalisable Foundation Models for Brain MRIcited by 8
  2. 2024The Perils of Optimizing Learned Reward Functions: Low Training Error Does Not Guarantee Low Regretcited by 6
  3. 2024RobustEMD: Domain Robust Matching for Cross-domain Few-shot Medical Image Segmentationcited by 6
  4. 2025Modality-Balanced Collaborative Distillation for Multi-Modal Domain Generalizationcited by 6
  5. 2025Medical Knowledge Intervention Prompt Tuning for Medical Image Classificationcited by 5
  6. 2024Deep Generative Classification of Blood Cell Morphologycited by 4
  7. 2026BrainDINO: A Brain MRI Foundation Model for Generalizable Clinical Representation Learningcited by 4
  8. 2025Decoupling Clinical and Class-Agnostic Features for Reliable Few-Shot Adaptation under Shiftcited by 3
  9. 2024FIESTA: Fourier-Based Semantic Augmentation with Uncertainty Guidance for Enhanced Domain Generalizability in Medical Image Segmentationcited by 2
  10. 2025Can Diffusion Models Bridge the Domain Gap in Cardiac MR Imaging?cited by 2
  11. 2025In-hoc Concept Representations to Regularise Deep Learning in Medical Imagingcited by 2
  12. 2025Enhancing Fairness in Skin Lesion Classification for Medical Diagnosis Using Prune Learningcited by 2
35 more
  1. 2025GNN-based Unified Deep Learningcited by 1
  2. 2026Stylizing ViT: Anatomy-Preserving Instance Style Transfer for Domain Generalizationcited by 1
  3. 2026Managing Diabetic Retinopathy with Deep Learning: A Data Centric Overviewcited by 1
  4. 2026Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning for Domain-specific Gastrointestinal Disease Recognitioncited by 1
  5. 2026Beyond Random Partitioning: Unsupervised Spatio-Temporal Stratification for Cohort Balancing in Longitudinal Medical Imagingcited by 1
  6. 2025Color-Quality Invariance for Robust Medical Image Segmentationcited by 0
  7. 2025Multi-Modal Artificial Intelligence of Embryo Grading and Pregnancy Prediction in Assisted Reproductive Technology: A Reviewcited by 0
  8. 2025Learning Semantic Directions for Feature Augmentation in Domain-Generalized Medical Segmentationcited by 0
  9. 2025Disentanglement of Biological and Technical Factors via Latent Space Rotation in Clinical Imaging Improves Disease Pattern Discoverycited by 0
  10. 2025MRN: Harnessing 2D Vision Foundation Models for Diagnosing Parkinson's Disease with Limited 3D MR Datacited by 0
  11. 2025FedDAPL: Toward Client-Private Generalization in Federated Learningcited by 0
  12. 2025TreeFedDG: Alleviating Global Drift in Federated Domain Generalization for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 0
  13. 2025Uncertainty-Guided Selective Adaptation Enables Cross-Platform Predictive Fluorescence Microscopycited by 0
  14. 2025MMRINet: Efficient Mamba-Based Segmentation with Dual-Path Refinement for Low-Resource MRI Analysiscited by 0
  15. 2025XAI-Driven Diagnosis of Generalization Failure in State-Space Cerebrovascular Segmentation Models: A Case Study on Domain Shift Between RSNA and TopCoW Datasetscited by 0
  16. 2025A-QCF-Net: An Adaptive Quaternion Cross-Fusion Network for Multimodal Liver Tumor Segmentation from Unpaired Datasetscited by 0
  17. 2026Controllable Diffusion-Based Lesion Inpainting for Scalable Histopathology Data Augmentationcited by 0
  18. 2026SegRap2025: A Benchmark of Gross Tumor Volume and Lymph Node Clinical Target Volume Segmentation for Radiotherapy Planning of Nasopharyngeal Carcinomacited by 0
  19. 2026Looking Beyond Accuracy: A Holistic Benchmark of ECG Foundation Modelscited by 0
  20. 2026VesselBridge3D: A Foundation Model Adaptation Framework for Label-Efficient 3D Vessel Segmentationcited by 0
  21. 2026K-MaT: Knowledge-Anchored Manifold Transport for Cross-Modal Prompt Learning in Medical Imagingcited by 0
  22. 2026Human Knowledge Integrated Multi-modal Learning for Single Source Domain Generalizationcited by 0
  23. 2026Towards Fair and Robust Volumetric CT Classification via KL-Regularised Group Distributionally Robust Optimisationcited by 0
  24. 2026Domain Elastic Transform: Bayesian Function Registration for High-Dimensional Scientific Datacited by 0
  25. 2026Few-Shot Left Atrial Wall Segmentation in 3D LGE MRI via Meta-Learningcited by 0
  26. 2026Decoupling Wavelet Sub-bands for Single Source Domain Generalization in Fundus Image Segmentationcited by 0
  27. 2026CRISP: Rank-Guided Iterative Squeezing for Robust Medical Image Segmentation under Domain Shiftcited by 0
  28. 2026FGML-DG: Feynman-Inspired Cognitive Science Paradigm for Cross-Domain Medical Image Segmentationcited by 0
  29. 2026CrossFlowDG: Bridging the Modality Gap with Cross-modal Flow Matching for Domain Generalizationcited by 0
  30. 2026Entropy Minimization without Model Collapse: Mitigating Prediction Bias in Medical Imagingcited by 0
  31. 2026Improving PET/CT-Based Whole-Body Lesion Segmentation Using Prediction Uncertainty-Augmented Modelscited by 0
  32. 2026Towards Global AI-Driven Cervical Cancer Screeningcited by 0
  33. 2026MaRS: Robust Out-of-Distribution Detection via Mahalanobis Residual Scoringcited by 0
  34. 2026CRISP: Constrained Refinement via Iterative Squeezing Process for Robust Medical Image Segmentation under Domain Shiftcited by 0
  35. 2026Learning Prostate Anatomy at Test Time for Cancer Detection in Micro-Ultrasoundcited by 0