EAAI Journal 2026 Journal Article
Irrelevance discriminative network for enhancing cross-center generalization in medical imaging segmentation
- Yibin Lin
- Dongming Li
- Xiao Chen
- Wude He
- Qi Guan
- Danru Chen
- Anguo Zhang
- Xiaorong Yan
Cross-center generalization in medical image segmentation (MIS) is a significant challenge due to the variability introduced by different imaging devices, operator techniques, and patient populations. In this paper, we propose the deep learning based Irrelevance Discriminative Network (ID-Net) method, which enhances cross-center generalization in MIS. We incorporate multiple auxiliary domain datasets (ADDs) from various centers alongside a single or limited number of target domain datasets. By training on the ADDs, the Irrelevance Discriminative (ID) module is capable of discriminating the latent representation of input images into common features, domain-specific features, and disturbance/noise. This allows for the fusion of common features with domain-specific features from the target domain dataset while discarding irrelevant noise, thereby significantly improving the cross-center generalization ability in the target domain tasks. Our approach effectively mitigates the domain shift problem and enhances the robustness and adaptability of MIS models across different centers.