Learning Generalized Medical Image Segmentation from Decoupled Feature Queries

Abstract Domain generalized medical image segmentation requires models to learn from multiple source domains and generalize well to arbitrary unseen target domain. Such a task is both technically challenging and clinically practical, due to the domain shift problem (i.e., images are collected from different hospitals and scanners). Existing methods focused on either learning shape-invariant representation or reaching consensus among the source domains. An ideal generalized representation is supposed to show similar pattern responses within the same channel for cross-domain images. However, to deal with the significant distribution discrepancy, the network tends to capture similar patterns by multiple channels, while different cross-domain patterns are also allowed to rest in the same channel. To address this issue, we propose to leverage channel-wise decoupled deep features as queries. With the aid of cross-attention mechanism, the long-range dependency between deep and shallow features can be fully mined via self-attention and then guides the learning of generalized representation. Besides, a relaxed deep whitening transformation is proposed to learn channel-wise decoupled features in a feasible way. The proposed decoupled fea- ture query (DFQ) scheme can be seamlessly integrate into the Transformer segmentation model in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments show its state-of-the-art performance, notably outperforming the runner-up by 1.31% and 1.98% with DSC metric on generalized fundus and prostate benchmarks, respectively. Source code is available at https://github.com/BiQiWHU/DFQ.