Towards Clinician-Preferred Segmentation: Leveraging Human-in-the-Loop for Test Time Adaptation in Medical Image Segmentation

Deep learning-based medical image segmentation models often face performance degradation when deployed across various medical centers, largely due to the discrepancies in data distribution. Test Time Adaptation (TTA) methods, which adapt pre-trained models to test data, have been employed to mitigate such discrepancies. However, existing TTA methods primarily focus on manipulating Batch Normalization (BN) layers or employing prompt and adversarial learning, which may not effectively rectify the inconsistencies arising from divergent data distributions. In this paper, we propose a novel Human-in-the-loop TTA (HiTTA) framework that stands out in two significant ways. First, it capitalizes on the largely overlooked potential of clinician-corrected predictions, integrating these corrections into the TTA process to steer the model towards predictions that coincide more closely with clinical annotation preferences. Second, our framework conceives a divergence loss, designed specifically to diminish the prediction divergence instigated by domain disparities, through the careful calibration of BN parameters. Our HiTTA is distinguished by its dual-faceted capability to acclimatize to the distribution of test data whilst ensuring the model's predictions align with clinical expectations, thereby enhancing its relevance in a medical context. Extensive experiments on a public dataset underscore the superiority of our HiTTA over existing TTA methods, emphasizing the advantages of integrating human feedback and our divergence loss in enhancing the model's performance and adaptability across diverse medical centers.