Hierarchical Spatiotemporal Context Aggregation and Speckle-aware Deformable Convolution for Echocardiography Video Segmentation

Automatic segmentation of echocardiography videos is crucial for computer-aided cardiovascular function assessment in clinical practice. However, it is a challenging task owing to the existence of massive speckle noise, the large shape variations of heart structures between frames, and limited annotations. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised video segmentation model to comprehensively meet these challenges. The proposed approach has two key techniques. First, we propose a dual-stream architecture that processes spatial and temporal features through separate pathways to capture structural details and motion patterns, then enhances spatiotemporal representations by interacting these decomposed features with query features generated from the original input. Second, as speckle noise primarily concentrates in high-frequency regions, we extend the traditional dilated convolution from a frequency perspective, enabling it to adaptively adjust the dilation rate and convolution kernel weights based on high frequency speckle noise information. This enables the network to focus on specific frequency bands, thereby enhancing its ability to capture both low-frequency context and high-frequency local details. Extensive experiments on the CAMUS and EchoNet-Dynamic datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and inference speed. Codes are available at https://github.com/guojx2255/HSCA-SDC.