# Unified CT and MRI Pancreas Segmentation for Label-Efficient Cross-Modality Subregion Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13043 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13043/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [U-Mamba: Enhancing Long-range Dependency for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04722/) (2024)
- [Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09508/) (2021)
- [AMOS: A Large-Scale Abdominal Multi-Organ Benchmark for Versatile Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08023/) (2022)
- [AbdomenCT-1K: Is Abdominal Organ Segmentation A Solved Problem?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14808/) (2020)
- [DeepOrgan: Multi-level Deep Convolutional Networks for Automated Pancreas Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06448/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised domain adaptation in brain lesion segmentation with adversarial networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08894/) (2016)
- [Synergistic Image and Feature Adaptation: Towards Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08211/) (2019)
- [Domain Adversarial Neural Networks for Domain Generalization: When It Works and How to Improve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03924/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical 3D Feature Learning for Pancreas Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01667/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Aggregation Weights for Federated Segmentation of Pancreas MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22530/) (2024)
- [Detection of Peri-Pancreatic Edema using Deep Learning and Radiomics Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17064/) (2024)
- [Pancreas Part Segmentation under Federated Learning Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23562/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robust medical image segmentation across imaging modalities is challenging because of large differences in appearance and intensity distributions. Models trained on a single modality often show substantial performance drops when applied to unseen domains. In this work, we develop a unified 3D pancreas segmentation framework that applies domain-adversarial learning to 4,604 heterogeneous CT and MRI scans to learn anatomical representations. A shared nnU-Net encoder-decoder is trained for whole-pancreas segmentation, with a latent domain discriminator encouraging CT-MRI feature alignment. The learned encoder is subsequently transferred to pancreatic head-body-tail segmentation using limited MRI-only subregion annotations. An average Dice score of 87.31% on the in-distribution test set and Dice scores ranging from 84.20% to 88.09% across external OOD datasets were achieved in whole pancreas segmentation. Dice scores of 80.53% on MRI and 83.05% on CT were achieved for downstream subregion segmentation, without using CT subregion annotations. These results demonstrate that a unified anatomical representation can support both cross-modality pancreas segmentation and label-efficient downstream transfer.
