CrossSpine: Multi-scale Cross-sequence Attention with Anatomical Priors for Automated Pfirrmann Grading

arXiv:2607.22728v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated grading of Lumbar Disc Degeneration is essential for the objective quantification of structural changes associated with low back pain. Observing that baseline models underperformed on our data, we propose a framework designed to overcome these limitations. First, we present the Cross-sequence Attention Spine (CrossSpine) framework, a novel architecture that employs a cross-sequence attention mechanism to adaptively fuse features from different MRI sequences at multiple spa- tial scales. Second, we contribute a meticulously curated dataset aimed at automated Pfirrmann grading. Finally, we introduce an IVD-aware classification technique that integrates anatomical disc-level information, enabling the model to learn level-specific degeneration priors. Our experi- ments demonstrate the superiority of this approach: CrossSpine achieved a relative improvement exceeding 125% in the Macro F1 score, while boosting the Mean AUPRC by 99% and the Mean AUROC by 36% com- pared to the baseline.

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Source: arXiv cs.CV | 2026-07-28