# SAF-Net: Self-Attention Fusion Network for Myocardial Infarction Detection using Multi-View Echocardiography

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15520 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15520/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Exploring Self-attention for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13621/) (2020)
- [Attention on Attention for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06954/) (2019)
- [TransFuse: Fusing Transformers and CNNs for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08005/) (2021)
- [Polyp-PVT: Polyp Segmentation with Pyramid Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06932/) (2021)
- [Early Detection of Myocardial Infarction in Low-Quality Echocardiography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02281/) (2020)
- [Left Ventricular Wall Motion Estimation by Active Polynomials for Acute Myocardial Infarction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04615/) (2020)
- [Early Myocardial Infarction Detection with One-Class Classification over Multi-view Echocardiography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07253/) (2022)
- [Studying the Effects of Self-Attention for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01486/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [ADA-Net: Attention-Guided Domain Adaptation Network with Contrastive Learning for Standing Dead Tree Segmentation Using Aerial Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04271/) (2025)
- [Multispectral Blind Image Super-Resolution for Standing Dead Tree Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02471/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Myocardial infarction (MI) is a severe case of coronary artery disease (CAD) and ultimately, its detection is substantial to prevent progressive damage to the myocardium. In this study, we propose a novel view-fusion model named self-attention fusion network (SAF-Net) to detect MI from multi-view echocardiography recordings. The proposed framework utilizes apical 2-chamber (A2C) and apical 4-chamber (A4C) view echocardiography recordings for classification. Three reference frames are extracted from each recording of both views and deployed pre-trained deep networks to extract highly representative features. The SAF-Net model utilizes a self-attention mechanism to learn dependencies in extracted feature vectors. The proposed model is computationally efficient thanks to its compact architecture having three main parts: a feature embedding to reduce dimensionality, self-attention for view-pooling, and dense layers for the classification. Experimental evaluation is performed using the HMC-QU-TAU dataset which consists of 160 patients with A2C and A4C view echocardiography recordings. The proposed SAF-Net model achieves a high-performance level with 88.26% precision, 77.64% sensitivity, and 78.13% accuracy. The results demonstrate that the SAF-Net model achieves the most accurate MI detection over multi-view echocardiography recordings.