{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-simple-normalization-technique-using-window","title":"A simple normalization technique using window statistics to improve the out-of-distribution generalization on medical images","arxiv_id":"2207.03366","date":"2022-07-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Chengfeng Zhou","Songchang Chen","Chenming Xu","Jun Wang","Feng Liu","Chun Zhang","Juan Ye","Hefeng Huang","Dahong Qian"],"abstract":"Since data scarcity and data heterogeneity are prevailing for medical images, well-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) using previous normalization methods may perform poorly when deployed to a new site. However, a reliable model for real-world clinical applications should be able to generalize well both on in-distribution (IND) and out-of-distribution (OOD) data (e.g., the new site data). In this study, we present a novel normalization technique called window normalization (WIN) to improve the model generalization on heterogeneous medical images, which is a simple yet effective alternative to existing normalization methods. Specifically, WIN perturbs the normalizing statistics with the local statistics computed on the window of features. This feature-level augmentation technique regularizes the models well and improves their OOD generalization significantly. Taking its advantage, we propose a novel self-distillation method called WIN-WIN for classification tasks. WIN-WIN is easily implemented with twice forward passes and a consistency constraint, which can be a simple extension for existing methods. Extensive experimental results on various tasks (6 tasks) and datasets (24 datasets) demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of our methods.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03366v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.03366v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-simple-normalization-technique-using-window","repo_url":"https://github.com/joe1chief/windownormalizaion","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"breast-cancer-detection","task_name":"Breast Cancer Detection"},{"task_slug":"out-of-distribution-generalization","task_name":"Out-of-Distribution Generalization"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}