# A Multi-Scale Spatial Transformer U-Net for Simultaneously Automatic Reorientation and Segmentation of 3D Nuclear Cardiac Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10095 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10095/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01266/) (2022)
- [The Medical Segmentation Decathlon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05735/) (2021)
- [Efficient Multi-Scale 3D CNN with Fully Connected CRF for Accurate Brain Lesion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05959/) (2016)
- [nnFormer: Interleaved Transformer for Volumetric Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03201/) (2021)
- [Fully Dense UNet for 2D Sparse Photoacoustic Tomography Artifact Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10848/) (2018)
- [Fully Convolutional Multi-scale Residual DenseNets for Cardiac Segmentation and Automated Cardiac Diagnosis using Ensemble of Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05173/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Continuous max-flow augmentation of self-supervised few-shot learning on SPECT left ventricles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05520/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate reorientation and segmentation of the left ventricular (LV) is essential for the quantitative analysis of myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI), in which one critical step is to reorient the reconstructed transaxial nuclear cardiac images into standard short-axis slices for subsequent image processing. Small-scale LV myocardium (LV-MY) region detection and the diverse cardiac structures of individual patients pose challenges to LV segmentation operation. To mitigate these issues, we propose an end-to-end model, named as multi-scale spatial transformer UNet (MS-ST-UNet), that involves the multi-scale spatial transformer network (MSSTN) and multi-scale UNet (MSUNet) modules to perform simultaneous reorientation and segmentation of LV region from nuclear cardiac images. The proposed method is trained and tested using two different nuclear cardiac image modalities: 13N-ammonia PET and 99mTc-sestamibi SPECT. We use a multi-scale strategy to generate and extract image features with different scales. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the reorientation and segmentation performance. This joint learning framework promotes mutual enhancement between reorientation and segmentation tasks, leading to cutting edge performance and an efficient image processing workflow. The proposed end-to-end deep network has the potential to reduce the burden of manual delineation for cardiac images, thereby providing multimodal quantitative analysis assistance for physicists.