Causality-Adjusted Data Augmentation for Domain Continual Medical Image Segmentation

In domain continual medical image segmentation, distillation-based methods mitigate catastrophic forgetting by continuously reviewing old knowledge. However, these approaches often exhibit biases towards both new and old knowledge simultaneously due to confounding factors, which can undermine segmentation performance. To address these biases, we propose the Causality-Adjusted Data Augmentation (CauAug) framework, introducing a novel causal intervention strategy called the Texture-Domain Adjustment Hybrid-Scheme (TDAHS) alongside two causality-targeted data augmentation approaches: the Cross Kernel Network (CKNet) and the Fourier Transformer Generator (FTGen). (1) TDAHS establishes a domain-continual causal model that accounts for two types of knowledge biases by identifying irrelevant local textures (L) and domain-specific features (D) as confounders. It introduces a hybrid causal intervention that combines traditional confounder elimination with a proposed replacement approach to better adapt to domain shifts, thereby promoting causal segmentation. (2) CKNet eliminates confounder L to reduce biases in new knowledge absorption. It decreases reliance on local textures in input images, forcing the model to focus on relevant anatomical structures and thus improving generalization. (3) FTGen causally intervenes on confounder D by selectively replacing it to alleviate biases that impact old knowledge retention. It restores domain-specific features in images, aiding in the comprehensive distillation of old knowledge. Our experiments show that CauAug significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting and surpasses existing methods in various medical image segmentation tasks. The implementation code is publicly available at: https://github.com/PerceptionComputingLab/CauAug_DCMIS.