CLMS: Bridging domain gaps in medical imaging segmentation with source-free continual learning for robust knowledge transfer and adaptation

Deep learning shows promise for medical image segmentation but suffers performance declines when applied to diverse healthcare sites due to data discrepancies among the different sites. Translating deep learning models to new clinical environments is challenging, especially when the original source data used for training is unavailable due to privacy restrictions. Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt models to new unlabeled target domains without requiring access to the original source data. However, existing SFDA methods face challenges such as error propagation, misalignment of visual and structural features, and inability to preserve source knowledge. This paper introduces Continual Learning Multi-Scale domain adaptation (CLMS), an end-to-end SFDA framework integrating multi-scale reconstruction, continual learning, and style alignment to bridge domain gaps across medical sites using only unlabeled target data or publicly available data. Compared to the current state-of-the-art methods, CLMS consistently and significantly achieved top performance for different tasks, including prostate MRI segmentation (improved Dice of 10.87 %), colonoscopy polyp segmentation (improved Dice of 17.73 %), and plus disease classification from retinal images (improved AUC of 11.19 %). Crucially, CLMS preserved source knowledge for all the tasks, avoiding catastrophic forgetting. CLMS demonstrates a promising solution for translating deep learning models to new clinical imaging domains towards safe, reliable deployment across diverse healthcare settings.