T-Mamba: Frequency-Enhanced Gated Long-Range Dependency for Tooth 3D CBCT Segmentation

Efficient tooth segmentation in three-dimensional (3D) imaging, critical for orthodontic diagnosis, remains challenging due to noise, low contrast, and artifacts in CBCT images. Both convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and transformers have emerged as popular architectures for image segmentation. However, their efficacy in handling long-range dependencies is limited due to inherent locality or computational complexity. To address this issue, we propose T-Mamba, integrating shared positional encoding and frequency-based features into vision mamba, to address limitations in spatial position preservation and feature enhancement in frequency domain. Besides, we also design a gate selection unit to integrate two features in spatial domain and one feature in frequency domain adaptively. T-Mamba is the first work to introduce frequency-based features into vision mamba. Extensive experiments demonstrate that T-Mamba achieves new SOTA results on the public Tooth CBCT dataset and outperforms previous SOTA methods by a large margin, i.e., IoU + 3.63%, SO + 2.43%, DSC +2.30%, HD -4.39mm, and ASSD -0.37mm. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/isbrycee/T-Mamba.