RF-DTR: a multi-stage DCT token regression network for progressive rib fracture mask refinement

Rib fracture patterns are key indicators of trauma severity. Detecting and locating these fractures is a critical yet time-consuming task, especially in 3D imaging, due to their minute size and irregular geometries. Existing voxel-based spatial methods fail to capture frequency-domain variations inherent in imaging and do not replicate the progressive refinement process used by clinicians during manual annotation, leading to suboptimal results. We propose a novel regression network, RF-DTR, incorporating a gated regressor mechanism and operating entirely in the frequency domain to address these challenges. Specifically, we present an innovative spatial-frequency transform applied to volumes and corresponding masks. Furthermore, we introduce a Mahalanobis regularization technique to enhance the model and learn high-frequency DCT components relevant to clinical tasks. Finally, a multi-stage penalty is proposed to improve the confidence of the prediction. Extensive experiments confirm our method's superiority in handling complex, sparsely annotated medical imaging datasets.