J Imaging Inform Med. 2026 Jun 22. doi: 10.1007/s10278-026-02061-4. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
Accurate kidney ultrasound segmentation is fundamental for clinical measurement and computer-aided diagnosis. However, domain shifts across devices and centers-manifested as differences in grayscale intensity, contrast, and speckle texture statistics-can substantially degrade model generalization, while acquiring new pixel-level annotations is costly. To address this, we propose a statistical spectral-similarity-guided ultrasound-to-ultrasound translation method to improve kidney segmentation performance without target-domain annotations. Motivated by frequency-domain analysis of renal ultrasound data, we observe that mid-to-low frequency components, which encode global organ structure, exhibit high consistency across domains, whereas mid-to-high frequency components, dominated by device-dependent speckle and texture statistics, vary substantially. Based on dataset-level frequency statistics, our method automatically identifies spectrally similar frequency bands shared by the source and target domains and derives structural guidance from them. This guidance is injected as a soft condition throughout a diffusion-based image generation process, enabling translation to target-device appearance while preserving anatomical structure. The translated images, paired with source-domain labels, are then used to train a segmentation network without requiring any target-domain annotations. Experiments on two public renal ultrasound datasets (OKUS and UNK) and an in-house multi-center dataset demonstrate superior structural preservation in image translation and consistently improved downstream segmentation performance, with particularly large reductions in boundary error. In the challenging OKUS to UNK adaptation scenario, our method boosts the mean Dice score by up to 20.52% (from 56.05% to 76.57%) and drastically reduces the 95% Hausdorff Distance (HD95) boundary error by 71.96 mm compared to the direct transfer baseline. Furthermore, consistent performance gains are achieved across the in-house multi-center dataset. These results indicate that the proposed spectral-similarity-based guidance effectively handles ultrasound domain shifts, substantially improving robustness and generalization for kidney segmentation under zero-shot and cross-center settings.
PMID:42332239 | DOI:10.1007/s10278-026-02061-4
