An Examination of Harmonizing Multi-Vendor Cardiac MRI Data for Vendor-Neutral Image Segmentation

Vendor-specific scanner hardware, software, and image acquisition protocols can introduce systematic biases into MRI scans. This introduces non-biological artifacts which introduce variations across MRI images from different vendors. Further, we ratified such non-biological variances by conducting a discrepancy study on the MnMs-2 Cardiac MRI dataset. Data harmonization is the process of combining datasets from different sources while removing unwanted variations that are not caused by biological differences. This is important because it allows researchers to increase the understanding of biological differences in data, while mitigating vendor-specific biases. We used a domain adaptation methodology (which is a data harmonization method) on the dataset to unlearn domain (or vendor) specific biases by introducing a confusion loss to confuse the encoder. Furthermore, we introduced a 3D segmentation model to this method to capture spatial information. This method demonstrates the performance on the main task (segmentation) and compares the domain predictor, before and after unlearning. This shows the magnitude of mitigating vendor-specific biases of the model. In addition to the model architecture performance, we documented the discrepancy study between inter-vendor model performance to demonstrate the magnitude of impact in which vendor-specific, and non-biological variations of MRI scans can affect the model.