Image normalization is a building block in medical image analysis. Conventional approaches are customarily employed on a per-dataset basis. This strategy, however, prevents the current normalization algorithms from fully exploiting the complex joint information available across multiple datasets. Consequently, ignoring such joint information has a direct impact on the processing of segmentation algorithms. This paper proposes to revisit the conventional image normalization approach by, instead, learning a common normalizing function across multiple datasets. Jointly normalizing multiple datasets is shown to yield consistent normalized images as well as an improved image segmentation when intensity shifts are large. To do so, a fully automated adversarial and task-driven normalization approach is employed as it facilitates the training of realistic and interpretable images while keeping performance on par with the state-of-the-art. The adversarial training of our network aims at finding the optimal transfer function to improve both, jointly, the segmentation accuracy and the generation of realistic images. We have evaluated the performance of our normalizer on both infant and adult brain images from the iSEG, MRBrainS and ABIDE datasets. The results indicate that our contribution does provide an improved realism to the normalized images, while retaining a segmentation accuracy at par with the state-of-the-art learnable normalization approaches.
Keywords: 3D MRI; Brain segmentation; Data harmonization; Generative adversarial networks; Intensity normalization.
Copyright © 2021. Published by Elsevier B.V.