# WDFFU-Mamba: A Wavelet-guided Dual-attention Feature Fusion Mamba for Breast Tumor Segmentation in Ultrasound Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17278 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17278/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Mamba for medical image analysis, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 31 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Mamba for medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/mamba-for-medical-image-analysis/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01266/) (2022)
- [Image Segmentation Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05566/) (2020)
- [U-Mamba: Enhancing Long-range Dependency for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04722/) (2024)
- [VM-UNet: Vision Mamba UNet for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02491/) (2024)
- [Recurrent Residual Convolutional Neural Network based on U-Net (R2U-Net) for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06955/) (2018)
- [Swin-UMamba: Mamba-based UNet with ImageNet-based pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03302/) (2024)
- [Deep Semantic Segmentation of Natural and Medical Images: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07655/) (2019)
- [UTNet: A Hybrid Transformer Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00781/) (2021)
- [MISSFormer: An Effective Medical Image Segmentation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07162/) (2021)
- [TransAttUnet: Multi-level Attention-guided U-Net with Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05274/) (2021)
- [LightM-UNet: Mamba Assists in Lightweight UNet for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05246/) (2024)
- [UltraLight VM-UNet: Parallel Vision Mamba Significantly Reduces Parameters for Skin Lesion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20035/) (2024)
- [VM-UNET-V2 Rethinking Vision Mamba UNet for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09157/) (2024)
- [H-vmunet: High-order Vision Mamba UNet for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13642/) (2024)
- [Semi-Mamba-UNet: Pixel-Level Contrastive and Pixel-Level Cross-Supervised Visual Mamba-based UNet for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07245/) (2024)
- [HC-Mamba: Vision MAMBA with Hybrid Convolutional Techniques for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05007/) (2024)
- [MedSG-Bench: A Benchmark for Medical Image Sequences Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11852/) (2025)
- [ESKNet-An enhanced adaptive selection kernel convolution for breast tumors segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02915/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Breast ultrasound (BUS) image segmentation plays a vital role in assisting clinical diagnosis and early tumor screening. However, challenges such as speckle noise, imaging artifacts, irregular lesion morphology, and blurred boundaries severely hinder accurate segmentation. To address these challenges, this work aims to design a robust and efficient model capable of automatically segmenting breast tumors in BUS images.We propose a novel segmentation network named WDFFU-Mamba, which integrates wavelet-guided enhancement and dual-attention feature fusion within a U-shaped Mamba architecture. A Wavelet-denoised High-Frequency-guided Feature (WHF) module is employed to enhance low-level representations through noise-suppressed high-frequency cues. A Dual Attention Feature Fusion (DAFF) module is also introduced to effectively merge skip-connected and semantic features, improving contextual consistency.Extensive experiments on two public BUS datasets demonstrate that WDFFU-Mamba achieves superior segmentation accuracy, significantly outperforming existing methods in terms of Dice coefficient and 95th percentile Hausdorff Distance (HD95).The combination of wavelet-domain enhancement and attention-based fusion greatly improves both the accuracy and robustness of BUS image segmentation, while maintaining computational efficiency.The proposed WDFFU-Mamba model not only delivers strong segmentation performance but also exhibits desirable generalization ability across datasets, making it a promising solution for real-world clinical applications in breast tumor ultrasound analysis.