Fat-suppressed breast MRI synthesis for domain adaptation in tumour segmentation

Abstract

Heterogeneity in dynamic contrast-enhanced breast MRI acquisition protocols hinders the generalization of automatic tumour segmentation tools. While fat-suppressed MRI acquisition is common, some vendors do not provide these sequences, making a segmentation model trained with fat-suppressed images unusable for non-fat-suppressed cases. In this study, we propose two strategies to alleviate this issue. The first approach involves translating non-fat-suppressed to fat-suppressed breast MRI. The second approach integrates synthetic non-fat-suppressed MRI into the training pipeline of tumour segmentation models. Our experimental results demonstrate that both approaches significantly improve segmentation performance on non-fat-suppressed MRI, suggesting that domain adaptation techniques based on image synthesis can enhance the accuracy and reliability of tumour segmentation in breast MRI. The generative models will be made publicly available at medigan library (medigan [18] GitHub repository).