Long-distance contextual attention network for skin disease segmentation

Abstract

In recent years, the incidence of skin diseases has increased significantly, and some malignant tumors caused by skin diseases have brought great hidden dangers to people’s health. In order to help experts perform lesion measurement and auxiliary diagnosis, automatic segmentation methods are very needed in clinical practice. Deep learning and contextual information extraction methods have been applied to many image segmentation tasks. However, their performance is limited due to insufficient training of a large number of parameters and these parameters sometimes fail to capture long-term dependencies. In addition, due to the many interfering factors of the skin disease image, the complex boundary and the uncertain size and shape of the lesion, the segmentation of the skin disease image is still a challenging problem. To solve these problems, we propose a long-distance contextual attention network(LCA-Net). By connecting the non-local module and the channel attention (CAM) in parallel to form a non-local operation, the long-term dependence is captured from the two dimensions of space and channel to enhance the network’s ability to extract features of skin diseases. Our method has an average Jaccard index of 0.771 on the ISIC2017 dataset, which represents a 0.6%improvement over the ISIC2017 Challenge Champion model. The average Jaccard index of 5-fold cross-validation on the ISIC2018 dataset is 0.8256. At the same time, we also compared with some advanced methods of image segmentation, the experimental results show our proposed method has a competitive performance.