Distill-SODA: Distilling Self-Supervised Vision Transformer for Source-Free Open-Set Domain Adaptation in Computational Pathology.

Developing computational pathology models is essential for reducing manual tissue typing from whole slide images, transferring knowledge from the source domain to an unlabeled, shifted target domain, and identifying unseen categories. We propose a practical setting by addressing the above-mentioned challenges in one fell swoop, i.e., source-free open-set domain adaptation. Our methodology focuses on adapting a pre-trained source model to an unlabeled target dataset and encompasses both closed-set and open-set classes. Beyond addressing the semantic shift of unknown classes, our framework also deals with a covariate shift, which manifests as variations in color appearance between source and target tissue samples. Our method hinges on distilling knowledge from a self-supervised vision transformer (ViT), drawing guidance from either robustly pre-trained transformer models or histopathology datasets, including those from the target domain. In pursuit of this, we introduce a novel style-based adversarial data augmentation, serving as hard positives for self-training a ViT, resulting in highly contextualized embeddings. Following this, we cluster semantically akin target images, with the source model offering weak pseudo-labels, albeit with uncertain confidence. To enhance this process, we present the closed-set affinity score (CSAS), aiming to correct the confidence levels of these pseudo-labels and to calculate weighted class prototypes within the contextualized embedding space. Our approach establishes itself as state-of-the-art across three public histopathological datasets for colorectal cancer assessment. Notably, our self-training method seamlessly integrates with open-set detection methods, resulting in enhanced performance in both closed-set and open-set recognition tasks.

Self-Attentive Spatial Adaptive Normalization for Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation.

Despite the successes of deep neural networks on many challenging vision tasks, they often fail to generalize to new test domains that are not distributed identically to the training data. The domain adaptation becomes more challenging for cross-modality medical data with a notable domain shift. Given that specific annotated imaging modalities may not be accessible nor complete. Our proposed solution is based on the cross-modality synthesis of medical images to reduce the costly annotation burden by radiologists and bridge the domain gap in radiological images. We present a novel approach for image-to-image translation in medical images, capable of supervised or unsupervised (unpaired image data) setups. Built upon adversarial training, we propose a learnable self-attentive spatial normalization of the deep convolutional generator network's intermediate activations. Unlike previous attention-based image-to-image translation approaches, which are either domain-specific or require distortion of the source domain's structures, we unearth the importance of the auxiliary semantic information to handle the geometric changes and preserve anatomical structures during image translation. We achieve superior results for cross-modality segmentation between unpaired MRI and CT data for multi-modality whole heart and multi-modal brain tumor MRI (T1/T2) datasets compared to the state-of-the-art methods. We also observe encouraging results in cross-modality conversion for paired MRI and CT images on a brain dataset. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of the cross-modality image translation, thorough ablation studies confirm our proposed method's efficacy.