English

Domain-invariant Mixed-domain Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Clustered Maximum Mean Discrepancy Alignment

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-01-26 v1

Abstract

Deep learning has shown remarkable progress in medical image semantic segmentation, yet its success heavily depends on large-scale expert annotations and consistent data distributions. In practice, annotations are scarce, and images are collected from multiple scanners or centers, leading to mixed-domain settings with unknown domain labels and severe domain gaps. Existing semi-supervised or domain adaptation approaches typically assume either a single domain shift or access to explicit domain indices, which rarely hold in real-world deployment. In this paper, we propose a domain-invariant mixed-domain semi-supervised segmentation framework that jointly enhances data diversity and mitigates domain bias. A Copy-Paste Mechanism (CPM) augments the training set by transferring informative regions across domains, while a Cluster Maximum Mean Discrepancy (CMMD) block clusters unlabeled features and aligns them with labeled anchors via an MMD objective, encouraging domain-invariant representations. Integrated within a teacher-student framework, our method achieves robust and precise segmentation even with very few labeled examples and multiple unknown domain discrepancies. Experiments on Fundus and M&Ms benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently surpasses semi-supervised and domain adaptation methods, establishing a potential solution for mixed-domain semi-supervised medical image segmentation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.16954,
  title  = {Domain-invariant Mixed-domain Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Clustered Maximum Mean Discrepancy Alignment},
  author = {Ba-Thinh Lam and Thanh-Huy Nguyen and Hoang-Thien Nguyen and Quang-Khai Bui-Tran and Nguyen Lan Vi Vu and Phat K. Huynh and Ulas Bagci and Min Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.16954},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

accepted in ICASSP 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:17:42.485Z