Histogram-Based Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Classification

Domain shift is a common problem in machine learning and medical imaging. Currently one of the most popular domain adaptation approaches is the domain-invariant mapping method using generative adversarial networks (GANs). These methods deploy some variation of a GAN to learn target domain distributions which work on pixel level. However, they often produce too complicated or unnecessary transformations. This paper is based on the hypothesis that most domain shifts in medical images are variations of global intensity changes which can be captured by transforming histograms along with individual pixel intensities. We propose a histogram-based GAN methodology for domain adaptation that outperforms standard pixel-based GAN methods in classifying chest x-rays from various heterogeneous target domains.