Improving Test-Time Adaptation For Histopathology Image Segmentation: Gradient-To-Parameter Ratio Guided Feature Alignment

In the field of histopathology, computer-aided systems face significant challenges due to diverse domain shifts. They include variations in tissue source organ, preparation and scanning protocols. These domain shifts can significantly impact algorithms’ performance in histopathology tasks, such as cancer segmentation. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a new multi-task extension of test-time adaptation (TTA) for simultaneous semantic, and instance segmentation of nuclei. First, to mitigate domain shifts during testing, we use a feature alignment TTA method, through which we adapt the feature vectors of the target data based on the feature vectors’ statistics derived from the source data. Second, the ratio of Gradient norm to Parameter norm (G2P) is proposed to guide the feature alignment procedure. Our approach requires a pre-trained model on the source data, without requiring access to the source dataset during TTA. This is particularly crucial in medical applications where access to training data may be restricted due to privacy concerns or patient consent. Through experimental validation, we demonstrate that the proposed method consistently yields competitive results when applied to out-of-distribution data across multiple datasets.