模仿医生看CT的主次平面习惯,提升3D医学影像分类准确率
Axial-Centric Cross-Plane Attention for 3D Medical Image Classification
- 设计轴向主导的跨平面注意力机制,模拟临床读片顺序
- 在6个数据集上超越现有方法,轻量版参数少但性能不降
- 适合关注临床逻辑与模型可解释性的医疗AI研究者
临床医生解读3D医学影像时通常以轴向平面为主,辅以冠状面和矢状面提供空间参考。然而多数3D深度学习模型对各平面一视同仁,未能体现这种以轴向为中心的诊断策略。为此,本文提出一种轴向主导的跨平面注意力架构,采用预训练的MedDINOv3作为冻结特征提取器处理三个平面图像。RICA模块和同平面Transformer捕捉平面特异性位置与上下文信息,而轴向主导的跨平面Transformer则选择性地将轴向表示依赖于辅助平面信息。在MedMNIST3D基准的六个数据集上的实验表明,该方法在准确率(ACC)和受试者工作特征曲线下面积(AUC)上均优于现有3D及多平面模型。轻量级版本AC-Tiny在参数显著减少的情况下仍保持竞争力,验证了架构设计的重要性超过模型规模。消融实验进一步证实轴向查询、QKV分配、方向性融合、无残差交叉注意力和分类头设计的有效性。切片级Grad-CAM可视化显示模型能识别各平面中的诊断相关区域。结果表明,将架构设计与临床读片流程对齐,有助于实现更鲁棒的3D医学影像分析。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Abridged: Clinicians commonly interpret 3D medical images by examining multiple anatomical planes rather than relying on volumetric views. In clinical CT workflows, the axial plane often serves as the primary diagnostic reference, while the auxiliary planes provide complementary spatial context. However, many existing 3D deep learning approaches either process volumetric data holistically or assign equal importance to all planes, failing to reflect this asymmetric, axial-centric interpretation strategy. To address this, we propose an axial-centric cross-plane attention architecture for 3D medical image classification that models asymmetric dependencies between anatomical planes. The architecture employs large-scale axial CT images pretrained MedDINOv3 as a frozen feature extractor for axial, coronal, and sagittal planes. RICA blocks and intra-plane transformer encoders capture plane-specific positional and contextual information, while axial-centric cross-plane transformer encoders selectively condition axial representations on complementary auxiliary representations. Experiments on six datasets from the MedMNIST3D benchmark show that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing 3D and multi-plane models in ACC and AUC. A lightweight variant, AC-Tiny, achieves competitive performance with substantially fewer trainable parameters, suggesting that architectural design contributes more to performance gains than increased model scale. Ablation studies further validate the importance of axial-centric querying, QKV allocation, directional cross-plane fusion, residual-free cross-attention, and classification head design. Slice-level Grad-CAM visualizations demonstrate that the model identifies diagnostically relevant regions across all planes. These findings highlight the value of aligning architectural design with clinical interpretation workflows for robust 3D medical image analysis.
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