# Adversarial Attacks on Medical Hyperspectral Imaging Exploiting Spectral-Spatial Dependencies and Multiscale Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07056 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07056/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning for Hyperspectral Image Classification: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12861/) (2019)
- [HybridSN: Exploring 3D-2D CNN Feature Hierarchy for Hyperspectral Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06701/) (2019)
- [Trends in deep learning for medical hyperspectral image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13974/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning for Polyp Segmentation: Techniques, Challenges and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18373/) (2023)
- [In-Vivo Hyperspectral Human Brain Image Database for Brain Cancer Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10776/) (2024)
- [Adversarial Exposure Attack on Diabetic Retinopathy Imagery Grading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09231/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Medical hyperspectral imaging (MHSI) has shown strong potential for disease diagnosis by capturing spectral-spatial information of tissues. While deep learning has substantially improved MHSI classification accuracy, its robustness remains limited due to the well-known trade-off between accuracy and robustness in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). This issue is particularly critical in MHSI, where reliable prediction depends on local tissue relationships and multiscale spectral-spatial structures. A practical way to improve robustness is to identify the most unstable adversarial examples and incorporate them into adversarial training. However, existing attack methods do not sufficiently exploit these MHSI-specific properties, leading to suboptimal attack effectiveness and limited value for robustness enhancement. To address this gap, we propose a structured adversarial attack framework for MHSI that progressively models its local spectral-spatial dependencies and multiscale hierarchical representations. The proposed method generates anatomically consistent perturbations by modeling neighborhood dependencies and hierarchical spectral-spatial features. Experiments on the brain and choledoch datasets show that our method more effectively degrades lesion-related classification performance in critical tumor regions than existing baselines while maintaining low perturbation magnitude. These results reveal a clinically relevant robustness weakness in current MHSI models and provide stronger adversarial samples for developing targeted defense strategies.