DAM-Seg: Anatomically accurate cardiac segmentation using Dense Associative Networks
This work addresses anatomically accurate cardiac segmentation for medical imaging applications, offering a robust solution that is incremental by building on existing transformer and associative network methods.
The paper tackled the problem of anatomically incorrect cardiac segmentation in deep learning by proposing a transformer-based architecture using dense associative networks to enforce anatomical correctness without increasing complexity. The model outperformed baselines on CAMUS and CardiacNet datasets, demonstrating enhanced robustness and reliability.
Deep learning-based cardiac segmentation has seen significant advancements over the years. Many studies have tackled the challenge of anatomically incorrect segmentation predictions by introducing auxiliary modules. These modules either post-process segmentation outputs or enforce consistency between specific points to ensure anatomical correctness. However, such approaches often increase network complexity, require separate training for these modules, and may lack robustness in scenarios with poor visibility. To address these limitations, we propose a novel transformer-based architecture that leverages dense associative networks to learn and retain specific patterns inherent to cardiac inputs. Unlike traditional methods, our approach restricts the network to memorize a limited set of patterns. During forward propagation, a weighted sum of these patterns is used to enforce anatomical correctness in the output. Since these patterns are input-independent, the model demonstrates enhanced robustness, even in cases with poor visibility. The proposed pipeline was evaluated on two publicly available datasets, CAMUS and CardiacNet. Experimental results indicate that our model consistently outperforms baseline approaches across all metrics, highlighting its effectiveness and reliability for cardiac segmentation tasks.