SpectralMamba-UNet: Frequency-Disentangled State Space Modeling for Texture-Structure Consistent Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Fuhao Zhang, Lei Liu, Jialin Zhang, Ya-Nan Zhang, Nan Mu
Organizations: College of Computer Science, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, Sichuan 610068, China · Zhejiang University & Ant Group, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China · State Key Laboratory of Public Big Data, Guizhou University, Guiyang, Guizhou 550025, China
Accurate medical image segmentation requires effective modeling of both global anatomical structures and fine-grained boundary details. Recent state space models (e.g., Vision Mamba) offer efficient long-range dependency modeling. However, their one-dimensional serialization weakens local spatial continuity and high-frequency representation. To this end, we propose SpectralMamba-UNet, a novel frequency-disentangled framework to decouple the learning of structural and textural information in the spectral domain. Our Spectral Decomposition and Modeling (SDM) module applies discrete cosine transform to decompose low- and high-frequency features, where low frequency contributes to global contextual modeling via a frequency-domain Mamba and high frequency preserves boundary-sensitive details. To balance spectral contributions, we introduce a Spectral Channel Reweighting (SCR) mechanism to form channel-wise frequency-aware attention, and a Spectral-Guided Fusion (SGF) module to achieve adaptively multi-scale fusion in the decoder. Experiments on five public benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements across diverse modalities and segmentation targets, validating the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Architecture of SpectralMamba-UNet. SDM performs spectral decomposition, SCR reweights frequency responses, and SGF enables frequency-guided decoder fusion.
Model
DSC ↑
HD95 ↓
Aorta
Gallbladder
Kidney (L)
Kidney (R)
Liver
Pancreas
Spleen
Stomach
Res-UNet
77.27
20.86
88.58
55.60
80.54
77.96
94.18
61.68
88.05
71.59
TransUNet
77.48
31.69
87.23
63.13
81.87
77.02
94.08
55.86
85.08
75.62
Swin-Transformer
79.13
21.55
85.47
66.53
83.28
79.61
94.29
56.58
90.66
76.60
UltraLight VM-UNet
38.12
56.28
58.96
–
–
–
87.69
31.50
73.48
53.35
VM-UNet
81.08
19.21
86.40
69.41
86.16
82.76
94.17
58.80
89.51
81.40
SpectralMamba-UNet
81.10
15.31
89.79
63.14
85.84
81.36
94.91
69.69
88.86
75.09
Table 1: Quantitative comparison on the Synapse dataset (multi-organ CT segmentation). Best results are shown in bold and second-best in underline .
Model
ACDC
DRIVE
EAT
IA
mDSC ↑
RV
Myo
LV
DSC ↑
HD95 ↓
DSC ↑
HD95 ↓
DSC ↑
HD95 ↓
Res-UNet
91.25
90.57
89.10
94.07
81.96
3.05
88.33
1.33
84.14
34.28
TransUNet
89.71
88.86
84.53
95.73
81.81
6.09
86.36
1.64
80.84
61.19
Swin-Transformer
90.00
88.55
85.62
95.83
71.54
4.94
84.41
1.58
84.49
21.52
UltraLight VM-UNet
78.84
76.68
75.53
84.32
78.57
9.64
76.78
2.76
85.23
23.90
VM-UNet
90.56
87.77
87.89
95.02
80.96
8.99
87.06
1.46
81.86
33.88
Table 2: Quantitative comparison on ACDC (cardiac MRI), DRIVE (retinal vessels), EAT (epicardial adipose tissue), and IA (intracranial aneurysm) datasets. Best results are shown in bold and second-best in underline .
Figure 2: Qualitative comparison on Synapse, ACDC, EAT, IA, and DRIVE (left to right). Compared with representative baselines (c–g), SpectralMamba-UNet (h) produces sharper boundaries and improved topological consistency.
Variant
Synapse
ACDC
DRIVE
EAT
IA
DSC ↑
HD95 ↓
DSC ↑
HD95 ↓
DSC ↑
HD95 ↓
DSC ↑
HD95 ↓
DSC ↑
HD95 ↓
Baseline
77.27
20.86
91.25
–
81.96
3.05
88.33
1.33
84.14
34.28
+Freq
77.76
17.08
91.83
–
83.05
2.70
88.87
1.71
85.63
22.76
+Spatial Mamba
77.51
22.07
91.76
–
83.07
2.58
88.40
1.54
84.66
33.03
+Freq+SCR+SGF
78.72
18.48
91.82
–
83.48
2.16
89.45
1.58
84.61
36.26
+SDM
78.05
22.19
91.77
–
83.39
2.39
90.16
1.27
84.40
26.78
Table 3: Ablation study of different components. +Freq denotes spectral-domain convolution (without Mamba), +Spatial Mamba denotes spatial-domain Mamba modeling, and +Freq+SCR+SGF represents spectral decomposition with channel reweighting and guided fusion. Best results are shown in bold .
Figure 3: Qualitative comparison of ablation variants. From left to right: input image, ground truth, Baseline, +Freq, +Spatial Mamba, +Freq+SCR+SGF, +SDM, and the complete SpectralMamba-UNet. The full model produces clearer boundaries and improved structural continuity across datasets.
Medical image segmentation delineates organs, lesions, and other structures in scans to support measurement, diagnosis, treatment planning, and research.
Accurate medical image segmentation is an integral part of the medical image analysis pipeline that requires the ability to merge local and global information. While vision transformers are able to capture global interactions using vanilla self-attention, their quadratic computational complexity in the input size remains a struggle for medical image segmentation tasks. Motivated by the dispersion property of vanilla self-attention and recent development of Mamba form of attention, Scalable and Efficient Mamba like Attention (SEMA) utilizes token localization via local window attention to avoid dispersion and maintain focusing, complemented by theoretically consistent arithmetic averaging to capture global aspect of attention. In this work, we present USEMA, a hybrid UNet architecture that merges the local feature extraction ability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with SEMA attention. We conduct experiments with USEMA across a variety of modalities and image sizes, demonstrating improved computational efficiency compared to transformer based models using full self-attention, and superior segmentation performance relative to purely convolution and Mamba-based models.
Hyperspectral image super-resolution aims to reconstruct high-resolution imagery while preserving dense spectral information. Recently, Mamba-based models have shown promising potential for this task by capturing long-range dependencies with linear computational complexity. Nevertheless, their causal sequence modeling requires two-dimensional hyperspectral features to be unfolded along predefined scanning orders, which disrupts spatial adjacency and restricts the effective propagation of contextual information. Moreover, state-space parameterization of existing models is predominantly derived from generic learned representations, without explicit alignment with the intrinsic characteristics of the hyperspectral image. To address this issue, we propose an Unmixing-derived Spectral and Structural Prompting Mamba framework, termed USP-Mamba, which adapts Mamba state evolution through composition-aware spectral priors and image-dependent structural prompts. Specifically, an unmixing-informed spectral prompt captures the global material composition of the input image and provides persistent conditioning throughout reconstruction. Injected into the Mamba sequence and progressively adapted across layers, it steers state evolution toward composition-consistent reconstruction. We introduce feature-level structural prompts comprising spatial and frequency components to provide image-dependent local guidance. The spatial prompt promotes structure-sensitive state encoding for local detail preservation, while the frequency prompt enables region-adaptive transitions between homogeneous regions and high-frequency details. Finally, complementary Hilbert and Semantic-Guided Neighboring scans preserve spatial continuity and strengthen non-local semantic dependency modeling. Extensive experiments on different datasets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms representative approaches.
Shi Chen, Jie Zhang, Yicong Zhou
Department of Computer Science, University of Macau, Macau, China
Medical image segmentation remains challenging in low-data regimes, where scarce annotations often yield poor generalization and ambiguous boundaries with missing fine structures. Recent self-supervised pretraining has improved transferability, but it often exhibits a texture bias. In contrast, accurate segmentation is inherently geometry-aware and depends on both topological consistency and precise boundary preservation. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage framework that couples structure-aware encoder pretraining with boundary-oriented decoding. In Stage-1, we aim to learn structure-aware representations for downstream segmentation in low-data regimes. To this end, we propose Mixed-Domain MeanFlow Pretraining, which aligns images and binary masks in a shared latent space through latent transport regression, where masks act as conditional structural guidance rather than prediction targets, making the pretraining task-agnostic. To further improve training stability under scarce supervision, we incorporate a lightweight Dispersive Loss to prevent representation collapse. In Stage-2, we fine-tune the pretrained encoder with a lightweight decoder that combines Direct Attentional Fusion for adaptive cross-scale gating and Frequency-Directional Dynamic Convolution for high-frequency boundary refinement under appearance variation. Experiments on ISIC-2016, Kvasir-SEG, and GlaS demonstrate consistent gains over state-of-the-art methods, with improved robustness in low-data settings and sharper boundary delineation.
Zhiquan Chen, Haitao Wang, Guowei Zou +1
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China · Guangdong Key Laboratory of Big Data Analysis and Processing, Guangzhou, China