Progression-guided spatiotemporal memory transformers for accurate and consistent longitudinal brain tumor segmentation

For monitoring the progression of the disease and the efficacy of treatment, it is essential to segment the brain tumor. The majority of the available deep learning models in use today are based on discrete time points without considering the continuity of the process, which causes irregular shapes of the tumors in the subsequent images. In this study, a model called Progression-Guided Spatiotemporal Memory Transformer (PGSMT) has been proposed, which has a unique design to overcome the constraints. A progression-aware temporal memory module, where the latent tumor representation is built up across successive MRI scans, a cross-time structural alignment mechanism, where the consistency of tumor morphology is preserved with the ability to accommodate pathological changes, and a boundary-enhanced transformer encoder, where the spatial dependencies are captured and stored for precise boundary delineation, are the three major components of the proposed framework. PGSMT learns the temporal weighting, making it possible for the network to distinguish between noise and actual progression, unlike other temporal fusion methods. When compared with the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), hybrid CNN-Transformer, and Transformer models, the proposed PGSMT outperforms these models in the BraTS longitudinal benchmark dataset. PGSMT shows statistically significant improvements (p < 0.05), with 88.1% Dice for the enhancing tumor, 90.2% Dice for the tumor core, and 93.0% Dice for the total tumor. while reducing inter-scan volumetric inconsistencies significantly. The relevant therapeutic interest in the dynamics of changing tumor volumes is substantiated by attention analysis. With respect to the empirical evaluation on the BraTS longitudinal data set, the results achieve 88.1% Dice for the enhancing tumor, 90.2% Dice for the tumor core, and 93.0% Dice for the total tumor, demonstrating statistically significant improvements (p < 0.05) compared to traditional methods, while the results indicate increased stability in terms of temporal variance.

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