PF-CMNet: Progressive Frequency-Aware Cross-Modal Network with Missing-Modality Distillation for 3D Brain Tumor Segmentation.

BACKGROUND/

objectivesAccurate automatic segmentation of multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is essential for neurosurgical planning and image-guided procedures. However, existing three-dimensional segmentation models often struggle with low lesion-to-tissue contrast, ambiguous tumor boundaries, small enhancing tumor regions, and performance degradation caused by missing imaging modalities. This study aimed to develop a robust segmentation framework that improves cross-modal representation learning, boundary recovery, and segmentation performance under incomplete-input conditions.

methodsWe propose PF-CMNet, a Progressive Frequency-Aware Cross-Modal Network with Missing-Modality Distillation for three-dimensional brain tumor segmentation. The network introduces a Cross-Modal Selective Frequency Attention module in the early encoder stage to model modality-specific frequency responses and spatially adaptive cross-modal correlations. A Progressive Cross-Scale Detail Fusion decoder is further employed to aggregate multilevel semantic features and refine high-resolution boundary details. To enhance robustness under missing-modality conditions, a teacher-student distillation strategy transfers full-modality predictions and shallow feature knowledge to a student network trained with random modality dropout.

resultsOn the MSD Task01_BrainTumour dataset, PF-CMNet achieved an average Dice score of 84.3%, with Dice scores of 79.6%, 82.8%, and 90.4% for enhancing tumor, tumor core, and whole tumor, respectively. On the BraTS2021 dataset, the model achieved an average Dice score of 88.2% and the lowest average 95th percentile Hausdorff distance among the compared methods. In predefined complete-modality absence stress tests, where unavailable MRI sequences were zero-masked to model the absence of input modalities rather than partial image degradation, the distilled model maintained average Dice scores of 78.64%, 82.58%, 58.39%, 82.03%, and 79.29% when FLAIR, T1, T1ce, T2, and T1 + T2 were unavailable, respectively.

conclusionsPF-CMNet provides a unified framework for multimodal brain tumor segmentation, improving full-modality segmentation accuracy, boundary consistency, and robustness to incomplete MRI inputs while maintaining a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off.