PCA for Enhanced Cross-Dataset Generalizability in Breast Ultrasound Tumor Segmentation

In medical image segmentation, limited external validity remains a critical obstacle when models are deployed across unseen datasets, an issue particularly pronounced in the ultrasound image domain. Existing solutions-such as domain adaptation and GAN-based style transfer-while promising, often fall short in the medical domain where datasets are typically small and diverse. This paper presents a novel application of principal component analysis (PCA) to address this limitation. PCA preprocessing reduces noise and emphasizes essential features by retaining approximately 90% of the dataset variance. We evaluate our approach across six diverse breast tumor ultrasound datasets comprising 3,983 B-mode images and corresponding expert tumor segmentation masks. For each dataset, a corresponding dimensionality reduced PCA-dataset is created and U-Net-based segmentation models are trained on each of the twelve datasets. Each model trained on an original dataset was inferenced on the remaining five out-of-domain original datasets (baseline results), while each model trained on a PCA dataset was inferenced on five out-of-domain PCA datasets. Our experimental results indicate that using PCA reconstructed datasets, instead of original images, improves the model's recall and Dice scores, particularly for model-dataset pairs where baseline performance was lowest, achieving statistically significant gains in recall (0.57 ± 0.07 vs. 0.70 ± 0.05, p = 0.0004) and Dice scores (0.50 ± 0.06 vs. 0.58 ± 0.06, p = 0.03). Our method reduced the decline in recall values due to external validation by 33%. These findings underscore the potential of PCA reconstruction as a safeguard to mitigate declines in segmentation performance, especially in challenging cases, with implications for enhancing external validity in real-world medical applications.