SSFMamba: Symmetry-driven Spatial-Frequency Feature Fusion for 3D Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract: In light of the spatial domain's limited capacity for modeling global context in 3D medical image segmentation, emerging approaches have begun to incorporate frequency domain representations. However, straightforward feature extraction strategies often overlook the unique properties of frequency domain information, such as conjugate symmetry. They also fail to account for the fundamental differences in data distribution between the spatial and frequency domains, which can ultimately dilute or obscure the complementary strengths that frequency-based representations offer. In this paper, we propose SSFMamba, a Mamba based Symmetry-driven Spatial-Frequency feature fusion network for 3D medical image segmentation. SSFMamba employs a complementary dual-branch architecture that extracts features from both the spatial and frequency domains, and leverages a Mamba block to fuse these heterogeneous features to preserve global context while reinforcing local details. In the frequency domain branch, we harness Mamba's exceptional capability to extract global contextual information in conjunction with the synergistic effect of frequency domain features to further enhance global modeling. Moreover, we design a 3D multi-directional scanning mechanism to strengthen the fusion of local and global cues. Extensive experiments on the BraTS2020 and BraTS2023 datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various evaluation metrics.