Frontiers in Physics (Mar 2023)

Attention-driven tree-structured convolutional LSTM for high dimensional data understanding

  • Yi Lu,
  • Bin Kong,
  • Feng Gao,
  • Kunlin Cao,
  • Siwei Lyu,
  • Shaoting Zhang,
  • Shu Hu,
  • Youbing Yin,
  • Xin Wang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2023.1095277
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11

Abstract

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Modeling sequential information for image sequences is a vital step of various vision tasks and convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) has demonstrated its superb performance in such spatiotemporal problems. Nevertheless, the hierarchical data structures (e.g., human body parts and vessel/airway tree in biomedical images) in various tasks cannot be properly modeled by sequential models. Thus, ConvLSTM is not suitable for analyzing tree-structured image data that has a rich relation among its elements. In order to address this limitation, we present a tree-structured ConvLSTM model for tree-structured image analysis which can be trained end-to-end. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we first evaluate the proposed tree-structured ConvLSTM model on a synthetic Tree-Moving-MNIST dataset for tree-structured modeling. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the tree-structured ConvLSTM model for tree-structured image analysis compared with other alternatives. Additionally, we present a tree-structured segmentation framework which consists of a tree-structured ConvLSTM layer and an attention fully convolutional network (FCN) model. The proposed framework is validated on four large-scale coronary artery datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method, showing its potential use cases in the analysis of tree-structured image data.

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