3D Medical Point Transformer: Introducing Convolution to Attention Networks for Medical Point Cloud Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces 3DMedPT, a Transformer-based model tailored for medical point cloud analysis, enhancing disease detection by capturing local and global features with novel modules and demonstrating superior results on medical and general datasets.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel attention-based model for medical point clouds that incorporates position embeddings and Multi-Graph Reasoning to improve feature learning and analysis.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art classification and segmentation on IntrA dataset.

Demonstrates strong generalization on ModelNet40 and ShapeNetPart.

Validates effectiveness of position embeddings and Multi-Graph Reasoning modules.

Abstract

General point clouds have been increasingly investigated for different tasks, and recently Transformer-based networks are proposed for point cloud analysis. However, there are barely related works for medical point clouds, which are important for disease detection and treatment. In this work, we propose an attention-based model specifically for medical point clouds, namely 3D medical point Transformer (3DMedPT), to examine the complex biological structures. By augmenting contextual information and summarizing local responses at query, our attention module can capture both local context and global content feature interactions. However, the insufficient training samples of medical data may lead to poor feature learning, so we apply position embeddings to learn accurate local geometry and Multi-Graph Reasoning (MGR) to examine global knowledge propagation over channel graphs to enrich feature representations. Experiments conducted on IntrA dataset proves the superiority of 3DMedPT, where we achieve the best classification and segmentation results. Furthermore, the promising generalization ability of our method is validated on general 3D point cloud benchmarks: ModelNet40 and ShapeNetPart. Code is released.