Multi-View Deformable Convolution Meets Visual Mamba for Coronary Artery Segmentation
About
Accurate segmentation of coronary arteries from computed tomography angiography (CTA) images is of paramount clinical importance for the diagnosis and treatment planning of cardiovascular diseases. However, coronary artery segmentation remains challenging due to the inherent multi-branching and slender tubular morphology of the vasculature, compounded by severe class imbalance between foreground vessels and background tissue. Conventional convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approaches struggle to capture long-range dependencies among spatially distant vascular structures, while Vision Transformer (ViT)-based methods incur prohibitive computational overhead that hinders deployment in resource-constrained clinical settings. Motivated by the recent success of state space models (SSMs) in efficiently modeling long-range sequential dependencies with linear complexity, we propose MDSVM-UNet, a novel two-stage coronary artery segmentation framework that synergistically integrates multidirectional snake convolution (MDSConv) with residual visual Mamba (RVM). In the encoding stage, we introduce MDSConv, a deformable convolution module that learns adaptive offsets along three orthogonal anatomical planes -- sagittal, coronal, and axial -- thereby enabling comprehensive multi-view feature fusion that faithfully captures the elongated and tortuous geometry of coronary vessels. In the decoding stage, we design an RVM-based upsampling decoder block that leverages selective state space mechanisms to model inter-slice long-range dependencies while preserving linear computational complexity. Furthermore, we propose a progressive two-stage segmentation strategy: the first stage performs coarse whole-image segmentation to guide intelligent block extraction, while the second stage conducts fine-grained block-level segmentation to recover vascular details and suppress false positives..