LiteFreqMamba:lightweight frequency-enhanced Mamba for efficient 3D brain tumor segmentation.

INTRODUCTION: State Space Models (SSMs) have demonstrated strong potential for 3D brain tumor segmentation owing to their linear computational complexity. However, conventional Mamba-based models are often limited by spectral bias, which favors low-frequency information while overlooking high-frequency boundary details, as well as by spatial disruption introduced by 1D scanning. METHODS: We propose LiteFreqMamba, a novel frequency-enhanced architecture for accurate and efficient 3D brain tumor segmentation. LiteFreqMamba is designed to improve boundary representation and spatial modeling through several key components. First, a Decomposed Frequency-Spatial Convolution (DFS-Conv) encoder is introduced to explicitly decompose features and capture high-frequency boundary information in shallow layers, thereby alleviating boundary ambiguity. Second, a Mamba-Attention Hybrid Bottleneck (MAHB) is developed to preserve spatial structure by combining the 2D-Selective-Scan (SS2D) mechanism for linear-complexity spatial mixing with dense self-attention for finegrained pixel-wise dependency modeling. In addition, Frequency-Calibrated Skip Connections (FCSC) are proposed to dynamically suppress noise in high-frequency feature injection, and a Lightweight 3D Convolutional (LWT-3D Conv) decoder is employed for efficient feature reconstruction. RESULTS: Extensive experiments on the BraTS2020 and BraTS2021 benchmarks show that LiteFreqMamba surpasses existing efficient segmentation models and achieves a better balance between inference speed and segmentation accuracy. DISCUSSION: LiteFreqMamba is designed to improve high-frequency boundary representation and preserve spatial dependencies in Mamba-based architectures. The proposed framework provides an efficient and accurate solution for 3D brain tumor image segmentation.