SynthMix: Mixing up Aligned Synthesis for Medical Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation

Abstract

The adversarial methods showed advanced performance by producing synthetic images to mitigate the domain shift, a common problem due to the hardship of acquiring labelled data in medical field. Most existing studies focus on modifying the network architecture, but little has worked on the GAN training strategy. In this work, we propose SynthMix, an add-on module with a natural yet effective training policy that can promote synthetic quality without altering the network architecture. Following the adversarial philosophy of GAN, we designed a mix-up synthesis scheme termed SynthMix. It coherently mixed up aligned images of real and synthetic samples to stimulate the generation of fine-grained features, examined by an associated Inspector for the domain-specific details. We evaluated our method on two segmentation benchmarks among three publicly available datasets, where our method showed a significant performance gain compared with existing state-of-the-art approaches.