Exploiting K-Space in Magnetic Resonance Imaging Diagnosis: Dual-Path Attention Fusion for K-Space Global and Image Local Features.

Abstract

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) diagnosis, enhanced by deep learning methods, plays a crucial role in medical image processing, facilitating precise clinical diagnosis and optimal treatment planning. Current methodologies predominantly focus on feature extraction from the image domain, which often results in the loss of global features during down-sampling processes. However, the unique global representational capacity of MRI K-space is often overlooked. In this paper, we present a novel MRI K-space-based global feature extraction and dual-path attention fusion network. Our proposed method extracts global features from MRI K-space data and fuses them with local features from the image domain using a dual-path attention mechanism, thereby achieving accurate MRI segmentation for diagnosis. Specifically, our method consists of four main components: an image-domain feature extraction module, a K-space domain feature extraction module, a dual-path attention feature fusion module, and a decoder. We conducted ablation studies and comprehensive comparisons on the Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) MRI dataset to validate the effectiveness of each module. The results demonstrate that our method exhibits superior performance in segmentation diagnostics, outperforming state-of-the-art methods with improvements of up to 63.82% in the HD95 distance evaluation metric. Furthermore, we performed generalization testing and complexity analysis on the Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) MRI cardiac segmentation dataset. The findings indicate robust performance across different datasets, highlighting strong generalizability and favorable algorithmic complexity. Collectively, these results suggest that our proposed method holds significant potential for practical clinical applications.