Abstract:Costal cartilage segmentation is crucial to various medical applications, necessitating precise and reliable techniques due to its complex anatomy and the importance of accurate diagnosis and surgical planning. We propose a novel deep learning-based approach called topology-guided deformable Mamba (TGDM) for costal cartilage segmentation. The TGDM is tailored to capture the intricate long-range costal cartilage relationships. Our method leverages a deformable model that integrates topological priors to enhance the adaptability and accuracy of the segmentation process. Furthermore, we developed a comprehensive benchmark that contains 165 cases for costal cartilage segmentation. This benchmark sets a new standard for evaluating costal cartilage segmentation techniques and provides a valuable resource for future research. Extensive experiments conducted on both in-domain benchmarks and out-of domain test sets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods, showing significant improvements in segmentation precision and robustness.