HWA-ResMamba: automatic segmentation of coronary arteries based on residual Mamba with high-order wavelet-enhanced convolution and attention feature aggregation

<i>Objective.</i>Automatic segmentation of coronary arteries is a crucial prerequisite in assisting in the diagnosis of coronary artery disease. However, due to the fuzzy boundaries, small-slender branches, and significant individual variations, automatic segmentation of coronary arteries is extremely challenging.<i>Approach.</i>This study proposes a residual Mamba with high-order wavelet-enhanced convolution and attention feature aggregation (HWA-ResMamba) for coronary arteries segmentation. The network consists of three core modules: high-order wavelet-enhanced convolution block (HWCB), residual Mamba (ResMamba), and attention feature aggregation (AFA) module. Firstly, the HWCB captures low-frequency information of the image in the shallow layers of the network, allowing for detailed exploration of subtle changes in the boundaries of coronary arteries. Secondly, the ResMamba module establishes long-range dependencies between features in the deep layers of the encoder and at the beginning of the decoder, improving the continuity of the segmentation process. Finally, the AFA module in the decoder reduces semantic differences between the encoder and decoder, which can capture small-slender coronary artery branches and further improve segmentation accuracy.<i>Main results.</i>Experiments on three coronary artery segmentation datasets have shown that the HWA-ResMamba outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in performance and generalization. Specifically, in the self-built dataset, HWA-ResMamba obtained Dice of 0.8857 and Hausdorff Distance (HD) of 1.9028, outperforming nnUnet by 0.0521, and 0.5489, respectively. HWA-ResMamba obtained Dice of 0.8371, and 0.7861 in the two public datasets, outperforming nnUnet by 0.0255, and 0.0107, respectively.<i>Significance.</i>Our method can accurately segment coronary arteries and can contribute to improved diagnosis and assessment of CAD.