PCA for Enhanced Cross-Dataset Generalizability in Breast Ultrasound Tumor Segmentation

dc.contributor.authorSchmidt, Christian
dc.contributor.authorOverhoff, Heinrich Martin
dc.contributor.editorSkala, Václav
dc.date.accessioned2025-07-30T09:04:04Z
dc.date.available2025-07-30T09:04:04Z
dc.date.issued2025
dc.description.abstract-translatedIn medical image segmentation, limited external validity remains a critical obstacle when models are deployed across unseen datasets, an issue particularly pronounced in the ultrasound image domain. Existing solutions-such as domain adaptation and GAN-based style transfer-while promising, often fall short in the medical domain where datasets are typically small and diverse. This paper presents a novel application of principal component analysis (PCA) to address this limitation. PCA preprocessing reduces noise and emphasizes essential features by retaining approximately 90% of the dataset variance. We evaluate our approach across six diverse breast tumor ultrasound datasets comprising 3,983 B-mode images and corresponding expert tumor segmentation masks. For each dataset, a corresponding dimensionality reduced PCA-dataset is created and U-Net-based segmentation models are trained on each of the twelve datasets. Each model trained on an original dataset was inferenced on the remaining five out-of-domain original datasets (baseline results), while each model trained on a PCA dataset was inferenced on five out-of-domain PCA datasets. Our experimental results indicate that using PCA reconstructed datasets, instead of original images, improves the model’s recall and Dice scores, particularly for model-dataset pairs where baseline performance was lowest, achieving statistically significant gains in recall (0.57 ± 0.07 vs. 0.70 ± 0.05, p = 0.0004) and Dice scores (0.50 ± 0.06 vs. 0.58 ± 0.06, p = 0.03). Our method reduced the decline in recall values due to external validation by 33%. These findings underscore the potential of PCA reconstruction as a safeguard to mitigate declines in segmentation performance, especially in challenging cases, with implications for enhancing external validity in real-world medical applications. Future studies are proposed to optimize PCA configurations for diverse imaging datasets and exploring integration with existing external validation methods.en
dc.description.sponsorshipThis work was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the program KMU-innovativ: Medizintechnik (project name: MammaSound, grant number 13GW0703B).
dc.format8 s.cs
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.doihttp://www.doi.org/10.24132/CSRN.2025-5
dc.identifier.issn2464-4617 (Print)
dc.identifier.issn2464-4625 (online)
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11025/62211
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherVaclav Skala - UNION Agencyen
dc.rights© Vaclav Skala - UNION Agencyen
dc.rights.accessopenAccessen
dc.subjectsegmentace nádorů prsucs
dc.subjectgeneralizace doméncs
dc.subjectultrazvukové zobrazovánícs
dc.subjectneuronové sítěcs
dc.subjectanalýza hlavních komponentcs
dc.subject.translatedbreast tumor segmentationen
dc.subject.translateddomain generalizationen
dc.subject.translatedultrasound imagingen
dc.subject.translatedneural networksen
dc.subject.translatedprincipal component analysisen
dc.titlePCA for Enhanced Cross-Dataset Generalizability in Breast Ultrasound Tumor Segmentationen
dc.typekonferenční příspěvekcs
dc.typeconferenceObjecten
dc.type.statusPeer revieweden
dc.type.versionpublishedVersionen
local.files.count1*
local.files.size1490007*
local.has.filesyes*

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