Skull stripping with purely synthetic data

Jong Sung Park, Juhyung Ha, Siddhesh Thakur, Alexandra Badea, Spyridon Bakas, Eleftherios Garyfallidis

Abstract: While many skull stripping algorithms have been developed for multi-modal and multi-species cases, there is still a lack of a fundamentally generalizable approach. We present PUMBA(PUrely synthetic Multimodal/species invariant Brain extrAction), a strategy to train a model for brain extraction with no real brain images or labels. Our results show that even without any real images or anatomical priors, the model achieves comparable accuracy in multi-modal, multi-species and pathological cases. This work presents a new direction of research for any generalizable medical image segmentation task.