Source-Free Active Domain Adaptation for Brain Tumor Segmentation via Mamba and Region-Level Uncertainty

Abstract

Background/Objectives: Accurate brain tumor segmentation from MRI is crucial for diagnosis but faces challenges like domain shifts across medical centers, data privacy constraints, and high annotation costs. While source-free active domain adaptation (SFADA) emerges as a promising solution to these issues, existing approaches often overlook the inherent structural complexity in tumor regions. Methods: We propose a novel SFADA framework composed of two major contributions. First, we introduce a Region-level Uncertainty-Guided Sample Selection (RUGS) strategy, enabling the identification of the most informative target-domain samples in a single inference pass. Second, we present the Source-Free Active Domain Adaptation Network (SFADA-Net), a Mamba-driven segmentation model equipped with a dual-path multi-kernel convolution module for enhanced local feature interaction and a structure-aware prompted Mamba module for capturing global spatial relationships. Results: Extensive evaluations across one source domain dataset (BraTS-2021) and three target domain datasets (BraTS-SSA, BraTS-PED, and BraTS-MEN 2023) demonstrate the superior adaptability of the proposed method, achieving consistently high segmentation accuracy across domains. With only 5% annotation budget, our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation and domain adaptation methods, achieving robust segmentation accuracy across diverse domains and approaching the performance of fully supervised learning. Conclusions: The proposed method achieves superior accuracy in brain tumor region segmentation and precise boundary delineation under a limited annotation budget. It effectively mitigates domain shift while fully complying with data privacy regulations. Consequently, our framework relieves manual annotation bottlenecks and accelerates the cross-center deployment of accurate diagnostic tools, facilitating the clinical application of domain adaptation.