TransforMesh: A Transformer Network for Longitudinal modeling of Anatomical Meshes
This work addresses the problem of tracking disease progression for Alzheimer's patients, but it is incremental as it combines existing transformer and mesh methods in a new domain.
The authors tackled modeling longitudinal neuroanatomical changes in Alzheimer's disease by introducing TransforMesh, a transformer-based network for 3D anatomical meshes, which outperformed baselines in capturing shape trajectories and detected structural anomalies in the hippocampus.
The longitudinal modeling of neuroanatomical changes related to Alzheimer's disease (AD) is crucial for studying the progression of the disease. To this end, we introduce TransforMesh, a spatio-temporal network based on transformers that models longitudinal shape changes on 3D anatomical meshes. While transformer and mesh networks have recently shown impressive performances in natural language processing and computer vision, their application to medical image analysis has been very limited. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that combines transformer and mesh networks. Our results show that TransforMesh can model shape trajectories better than other baseline architectures that do not capture temporal dependencies. Moreover, we also explore the capabilities of TransforMesh in detecting structural anomalies of the hippocampus in patients developing AD.