Bi-level Learning of Task-Specific Decoders for Joint Registration and One-Shot Medical Image Segmentation

One-shot medical image segmentation (MIS) aims to cope with the expensive, time-consuming, and inherent human bias annotations. One prevalent method to address one-shot MIS is joint registration and segmentation (JRS) with a shared encoder, which mainly explores the voxel-wise correspondence between the labeled data and unlabeled data for better segmentation. However, this method omits underlying connections between task-specific decoders for segmentation and registration, leading to unstable training. In this paper, we propose a novel Bi-level Learning of Task-Specific Decoders for one-shot MIS, employing a pretrained fixed shared encoder that is proved to be more quickly adapted to brand-new datasets than existing JRS without fixed shared encoder paradigm. To be more specific, we introduce a bi-level optimization training strategy considering registration as a major objective and segmentation as a learnable constraint by leveraging inter-task coupling dependencies. Furthermore, we design an appearance conformity constraint strategy that learns the backward transformations generating the fake labeled data used to perform data augmentation instead of the labeled image, to avoid performance degradation caused by inconsistent styles between unlabeled data and labeled data in previous methods. Extensive experiments on the brain MRI task across ABIDE, ADNI, and PPMI datasets demonstrate that the proposed Bi-JROS outperforms state-of-the-art one-shot MIS methods for both segmentation and registration tasks. The code will be available at https://github.com/Coradlut/Bi-JROS.