# CHM-Net: Center Heatmap-driven Macro-Micro Modeling Network for MRI-based Microbial Density Stratification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09812 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09812/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [UNETR: Transformers for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10504/) (2021)
- [MedMNIST v2 -- A large-scale lightweight benchmark for 2D and 3D biomedical image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14795/) (2021)
- [X3D: Expanding Architectures for Efficient Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04730/) (2020)
- [Can Spatiotemporal 3D CNNs Retrace the History of 2D CNNs and ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09577/) (2017)
- [Med3D: Transfer Learning for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00625/) (2019)
- [SegMamba: Long-range Sequential Modeling Mamba For 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13560/) (2024)
- [Transformers in Medical Imaging: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09873/) (2022)
- [MedViT: A Robust Vision Transformer for Generalized Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09462/) (2023)
- [3D Deeply Supervised Network for Automatic Liver Segmentation from CT Volumes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00582/) (2016)
- [XFMamba: Cross-Fusion Mamba for Multi-View Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02619/) (2025)
- [HWA-UNETR: Hierarchical Window Aggregate UNETR for 3D Multimodal Gastric Lesion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10464/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Microbial density is clinically important for tumor assessment and treatment decision-making, and recent advances in deep learning suggest that it can be non-invasively inferred from multimodal MRI. In this work, MRI-based Microbial Density Stratification (MRI-MDS) is first investigated as a patient-level representation learning task, and Center Heatmap-driven Macro-micro modeling Network (CHM-Net) is introduced for this task. CHM-Net first establishes the link between imaging phenotypes and microbial states through center heatmap-guided small-lesion response localization. Building upon this, it constructs patient-level macro-micro evidence from localized heatmap responses for microbial density prediction. Experiments on the novel GBNPC 2026 dataset constructed for MRI-MDS demonstrate the effectiveness of CHM-Net, achieving superior performance over representative baselines with a 12.06% absolute ACC gain over the strongest competing result. Additionally, auxiliary validation on two 3D medical image datasets further verifies its robustness across volumetric medical image classification scenarios. The project is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CHM-Net-942E/.