Unlearning Scanner Bias for MRI Harmonisation

© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Combining datasets is vital for increased statistical power, especially for neurological conditions where limited data is available. However, variance due to differences in acquisition protocol and hardware limits our ability to combine datasets. We propose an iterative training scheme based on domain adaptation techniques, aiming to create scanner-invariant features while simultaneously maintaining overall performance on the main task. We demonstrate this on age prediction, but expect that our proposed training scheme will be applicable to any feedforward network and classification or regression task. We show that not only can we harmonise three MRI datasets from different studies, but can also successfully adapt the training to work with very biased datasets. The training scheme should, therefore, be applicable to most real-world data scenarios, enabling harmonisation for the task of interest.