# Transformer Network for Significant Stenosis Detection in CCTA of Coronary Arteries

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03035 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03035/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.08987/) (2017)
- [Learning Deep Transformer Models for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01787/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Input Representations for Neural Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10853/) (2018)
- [Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Computer-Aided Detection: CNN Architectures, Dataset Characteristics and Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03409/) (2016)
- [A Recurrent CNN for Automatic Detection and Classification of Coronary Artery Plaque and Stenosis in Coronary CT Angiography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04360/) (2018)
- [Coronary Artery Plaque Characterization from CCTA Scans using Deep Learning and Radiomics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06075/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Transformers in Medical Imaging: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09873/) (2022)
- [Advances in Medical Image Analysis with Vision Transformers: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03505/) (2023)
- [Transformers in Medical Image Analysis: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12165/) (2022)
- [Transforming medical imaging with Transformers? A comparative review of key properties, current progresses, and future perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01136/) (2022)
- [A survey on attention mechanisms for medical applications: are we moving towards better algorithms?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12406/) (2022)
- [RTN: Reinforced Transformer Network for Coronary CT Angiography Vessel-level Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06177/) (2022)
- [MedFormer: Hierarchical Medical Vision Transformer with Content-Aware Dual Sparse Selection Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02488/) (2025)
- [CAD-RADS Scoring using Deep Learning and Task-Specific Centerline Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03671/) (2022)
- [An Intra- and Cross-frame Topological Consistency Scheme for Semi-supervised Atherosclerotic Coronary Plaque Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07850/) (2025)
- [O2CTA: Introducing Annotations from OCT to CCTA in Coronary Plaque Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06358/) (2023)
- [CORA: Generalizable coronary artery disease assessment and risk stratification from coronary CT angiography using pathology-centric representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24847/) (2026)
- [BifDet: A 3D Bifurcation Detection Dataset for Airway-Tree Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24999/) (2026)
- [Clinical Risk-Aware Multi-Level Grading for Coronary Artery Stenosis through Curved Feature Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30082/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Coronary artery disease (CAD) has posed a leading threat to the lives of cardiovascular disease patients worldwide for a long time. Therefore, automated diagnosis of CAD has indispensable significance in clinical medicine. However, the complexity of coronary artery plaques that cause CAD makes the automatic detection of coronary artery stenosis in Coronary CT angiography (CCTA) a difficult task. In this paper, we propose a Transformer network (TR-Net) for the automatic detection of significant stenosis (i.e. luminal narrowing > 50%) while practically completing the computer-assisted diagnosis of CAD. The proposed TR-Net introduces a novel Transformer, and tightly combines convolutional layers and Transformer encoders, allowing their advantages to be demonstrated in the task. By analyzing semantic information sequences, TR-Net can fully understand the relationship between image information in each position of a multiplanar reformatted (MPR) image, and accurately detect significant stenosis based on both local and global information. We evaluate our TR-Net on a dataset of 76 patients from different patients annotated by experienced radiologists. Experimental results illustrate that our TR-Net has achieved better results in ACC (0.92), Spec (0.96), PPV (0.84), F1 (0.79) and MCC (0.74) indicators compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The source code is publicly available from the link (https://github.com/XinghuaMa/TR-Net).