An efficient, scalable, and adaptable plug-and-play temporal attention module for motion-guided cardiac segmentation with sparse temporal labels

UNet and DT-VNet. Integrating TAM into SAM yields a temporal SAM that reduces Hausdorff distance (HD) from 3.99 mm to 3.51 mm on the CAMUS dataset, while integrating TAM into a pre-trained MedSAM reduces HD from 3.04 to 2.06 pixels after fine-tuning on the EchoNet-Dynamic dataset. On the ACDC 3D dataset, our TAM-UNet and TAM-DT-VNet achieve substantial reductions in HD, from 7.97 mm to 4.23 mm and 6.87 mm to 4.74 mm, respectively. Additionally, TAM's training does not require segmentation of ground truths from all time frames and can be achieved with sparse temporal annotation. TAM is thus a robust, generalizable, and adaptable solution for motion-awareness enhancement that is easily scaled from 2D to 3D. The code is available at https://github.com/kamruleee51/TAM.