Multi-Channel Uncertainty-Weighted Score Matching for Conditional Diffusion in Medical UDA
About
Robust medical image segmentation across modalities remains challenging due to severe domain shifts and the lack of target-domain labels. While diffusion models have been explored for cross-domain generation and augmentation, target-domain conditional diffusion training typically relies on highly noisy pseudo masks; naively conditioning on a single Arg-Max pseudo-label can corrupt diffusion training and downstream segmentation. We propose UPDiff-UDA, a unified UDA framework whose core is an uncertainty-guided training objective for target-domain conditional diffusion. Given an imperfect source-trained segmenter, we use its per-pixel softmax distribution to form ranked pseudo-label maps (Arg-Max, Arg-2nd, Arg-3rd, ...). Each map yields a conditional score estimate, and we aggregate them via pixel-wise confidence weighting to obtain an uncertainty-reweighted score for score matching, improving robustness to pseudo-label noise while leveraging alternative plausible labels in uncertain regions. We further provide a theoretical justification showing that confidence-weighted aggregation follows a minimum-MSE convex-combination principle under the segmenter-induced surrogate label distribution. To improve pseudo-condition quality, we also introduce a feature-guided, low-degree-of-freedom B\'ezier curve adaptation to reduce appearance gaps. Experiments on multiple public datasets and modality shifts show that UPDiff-UDA generates high-fidelity labeled target-style samples for augmentation and consistently outperforms strong UDA baselines. The code for this project is available at: https://github.com/superlc1995/Multi-Channel-Uncertainty-Diffusion-UDA
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Medical Image Segmentation | Abdominal Abd MRI -> CT (test) | Liver Score84.89 | 24 | |
| Medical Image Segmentation | Abdominal Abd CT -> MRI (test) | Liver Score68.73 | 24 | |
| Medical Image Segmentation | BraTS FLAIR | Dice0.5937 | 17 | |
| Brain Tumor Segmentation | BraTS T1 Target Domain (test) | WT Score65.09 | 14 | |
| Brain Tumor Segmentation | BraTS T1CE Target Domain (test) | WT Score62.47 | 14 | |
| Cardiac Image Segmentation | MM-WHS Cardiac CT → Cardiac MRI | 95HD (LVM)12.59 | 14 | |
| Medical Image Segmentation | Abdominal Multi-Organ MRI → CT | 95HD (Liver)17.31 | 14 | |
| Medical Image Segmentation | Abdominal Multi-Organ CT → MRI | 95HD (Liver)29.69 | 14 | |
| Medical Image Segmentation | BraTS Target domain T1 | 95HD (WT)20.31 | 14 | |
| Cardiac Image Segmentation | MM-WHS Cardiac MRI → Cardiac CT | 95HD (LVM)6.78 | 14 |