  Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable segmentation
accuracy on benchmark datasets where training and test sets are from the same
domain, yet their performance can degrade significantly on unseen domains,
which hinders the deployment of CNNs in many clinical scenarios. Most existing
works improve model out-of-domain (OOD) robustness by collecting multi-domain
datasets for training, which is expensive and may not always be feasible due to
privacy and logistical issues. In this work, we focus on improving model
robustness using a single-domain dataset only. We propose a novel data
augmentation framework called MaxStyle, which maximizes the effectiveness of
style augmentation for model OOD performance. It attaches an auxiliary
style-augmented image decoder to a segmentation network for robust feature
learning and data augmentation. Importantly, MaxStyle augments data with
improved image style diversity and hardness, by expanding the style space with
noise and searching for the worst-case style composition of latent features via
adversarial training. With extensive experiments on multiple public cardiac and
prostate MR datasets, we demonstrate that MaxStyle leads to significantly
improved out-of-distribution robustness against unseen corruptions as well as
common distribution shifts across multiple, different, unseen sites and unknown
image sequences under both low- and high-training data settings. The code can
be found at https://github.com/cherise215/MaxStyle.
