# Language Guided Domain Generalized Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01272 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01272/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Domain Generalization via Invariant Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2115/) (2013)
- [Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09508/) (2021)
- [CHAOS Challenge -- Combined (CT-MR) Healthy Abdominal Organ Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06535/) (2020)
- [Causality-inspired Single-source Domain Generalization for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12525/) (2021)
- [Foundational Models Defining a New Era in Vision: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13721/) (2023)
- [Generalizable Cross-modality Medical Image Segmentation via Style Augmentation and Dual Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11177/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Data Augmentation for Single-source Domain Generalization in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14805/) (2022)
- [Cardiac Segmentation on Late Gadolinium Enhancement MRI: A Benchmark Study from Multi-Sequence Cardiac MR Segmentation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12434/) (2020)
- [Devil is in Channels: Contrastive Single Domain Generalization for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05254/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Consistency for Single Domain Generalization in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13737/) (2022)
- [3D Vision with Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04309/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Survey of Medical Vision-and-Language Applications and Their Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12195/) (2024)
- [Medical Referring Image Segmentation via Next-Token Mask Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05044/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Single source domain generalization (SDG) holds promise for more reliable and consistent image segmentation across real-world clinical settings particularly in the medical domain, where data privacy and acquisition cost constraints often limit the availability of diverse datasets. Depending solely on visual features hampers the model's capacity to adapt effectively to various domains, primarily because of the presence of spurious correlations and domain-specific characteristics embedded within the image features. Incorporating text features alongside visual features is a potential solution to enhance the model's understanding of the data, as it goes beyond pixel-level information to provide valuable context. Textual cues describing the anatomical structures, their appearances, and variations across various imaging modalities can guide the model in domain adaptation, ultimately contributing to more robust and consistent segmentation. In this paper, we propose an approach that explicitly leverages textual information by incorporating a contrastive learning mechanism guided by the text encoder features to learn a more robust feature representation. We assess the effectiveness of our text-guided contrastive feature alignment technique in various scenarios, including cross-modality, cross-sequence, and cross-site settings for different segmentation tasks. Our approach achieves favorable performance against existing methods in literature. Our code and model weights are available at https://github.com/ShahinaKK/LG_SDG.git.
