ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Med.
Sec. Ophthalmology
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1600736
This article is part of the Research TopicEfficient Artificial Intelligence in Ophthalmic Imaging – Volume IIView all 10 articles
Med-DGTN: Dynamic Graph Transformer with Adaptive Wavelet Fusion for Multi-label Medical Image Classification
Provisionally accepted
- 1Anhui University of Chinese Medicine, Hefei, China
- 2Hefei First People’s Hospital, Hefei, China
- 3Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Hefei, Anhui Province, China
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Introduction: Multi-label classification of medical imaging data aims to enable simultaneous identification and diagnosis of multiple diseases, delivering comprehensive clinical decision support for complex conditions. Current methodologies demonstrate limitations in capturing disease co-occurrence patterns and preserving subtle pathological signatures. To address these challenges, we propose Med-DGTN, a dynamically integrated framework designed to advance multi-label classification performance in clinical imaging analytics.The proposed Med-DGTN (Dynamic Graph Transformer Network with Adaptive Wavelet Fusion) introduces three key innovations: 1)A cross-modal alignment mechanism integrating convolutional visual patterns with graph-based semantic dependencies through conditionally reweighted adjacency matrices; 2)Wavelet-transform-enhanced dense blocks (WTDense) employing multi-frequency decomposition to amplify low-frequency pathological biomarkers; 3)An adaptive fusion architecture optimizing multi-scale feature hierarchies across spatial and spectral domains.Results: Validated on two public medical imaging benchmarks, Med-DGTN demonstrates superior performance across modalities:1)Achieving a mean average precision (mAP) of 70.65% on the retinal imaging dataset (MuReD2022), surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by 2.68 percentage points. 2) On the chest X-ray dataset (ChestXray14), Med-DGTN achieves an average Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.841. It outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in 5 of 14 disease categories.Discussion: This investigation establishes that joint modeling of dynamic disease correlations and wavelet-optimized feature representation significantly enhances multi-label diagnostic capabilities. Med-DGTN's architecture demonstrates clinical translatability by revealing disease interaction patterns through interpretable graph structures, potentially informing precision diagnostics in multi-morbidity scenarios.
Keywords: Dynamic Graph Transformer, Wavelet Transform, multi-label classification, Medical Image Analysis, deep learning
Received: 26 Mar 2025; Accepted: 11 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Li, Wang, Shi, Li and GU. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Yan Li, Hefei First People’s Hospital, Hefei, China
Zongyun GU, Anhui University of Chinese Medicine, Hefei, China
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