ME^2FDiff: Multiscale Expert Enhancing Feature Diffusion in Residual Network for Brain Tumor Segmentation

원문 초록

Automated segmentation of post-treatment glioma from MRI is essential for accurate diagnosis and treatment planning, yet remains difficult. Surgery and chemoradiotherapy cause structural changes in brain like resection cavities, edema, and fibrosis, that alter imaging appearance and mimic tumor recurrence. Contemporary segmentation architectures attain high accuracy with two limitations. First, the bottleneck originates from the deepest encoder stage, so one representation must serve sub-regions that differ widely in size and appearance. Second, they produce the segmentation in a single forward pass with no mechanism for refinement. We propose ME^2FDiff, a single-model architecture, addressing both. An attention-conditioned spectral diffusion block refines the bottleneck. It uses the image-conditioned latent diffusion process with two processes: a spatial pre-attention gate and a spectral fusion block whose timestep-adaptive bandpass filter selects the informative frequency band at each noise level. A multiscale expert-enhanced feature block fuses the intermediate encoder scales into the bottleneck through expert-selected shared tokens, guaranteeing balanced utilization without an auxiliary loss. On the BraTS 2024 post-treatment glioma dataset, ME^2FDiff achieves the best results on every tumor sub-region among all single-model baselines (91.23% Dice, 84.52% IOU, 2.13 mm HD95 on whole-tumor) and surpasses a three-expert ensemble on both overlap metrics at roughly one-third of its inference cost. Against recent state-of-the-art methods retrained under identical conditions, it maintains the strongest performance with the fewest parameters of any competing model. These findings demonstrate that a single, compact network can absorb the specialization, usually sought through ensembling or larger architectures.