MasHeNe: A Benchmark for Head and Neck CT Mass Segmentation using Window-Enhanced Mamba with Frequency-Domain Integration

TL;DR

This paper introduces MasHeNe, a new dataset for head and neck mass segmentation in CT scans, and proposes the WEMF model that achieves state-of-the-art results, providing a benchmark for future research.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel dataset with pixel-level annotations for diverse head and neck masses and introduces the WEMF model with frequency-domain integration for improved segmentation.

Findings

WEMF achieves a Dice score of 70.45%.

MasHeNe dataset includes 3,779 annotated CT slices.

WEMF outperforms standard segmentation baselines.

Abstract

Head and neck masses are space-occupying lesions that can compress the airway and esophagus and may affect nerves and blood vessels. Available public datasets primarily focus on malignant lesions and often overlook other space-occupying conditions in this region. To address this gap, we introduce MasHeNe, an initial dataset of 3,779 contrast-enhanced CT slices that includes both tumors and cysts with pixel-level annotations. We also establish a benchmark using standard segmentation baselines and report common metrics to enable fair comparison. In addition, we propose the Windowing-Enhanced Mamba with Frequency integration (WEMF) model. WEMF applies tri-window enhancement to enrich the input appearance before feature extraction. It further uses multi-frequency attention to fuse information across skip connections within a U-shaped Mamba backbone. On MasHeNe, WEMF attains the best performance among evaluated methods, with a Dice of 70.45%, IoU of 66.89%, NSD of 72.33%, and HD95 of 5.12 mm. This model indicates stable and strong results on this challenging task. MasHeNe provides a benchmark for head-and-neck mass segmentation beyond malignancy-only datasets. The observed error patterns also suggest that this task remains challenging and requires further research. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/drthaodao3101/MasHeNe.git.