Skin Lesion Segmentation Based on Multi-Scale Attention Convolutional Neural Network

The incidence of skin cancer around the world is increasing year by year. However, early diagnosis and treatment can greatly improve the survival rate of patients. Skin lesion boundary segmentation is essential to accurately locate lesion areas in dermatoscopic images. It is true that accurate segmentation of skin lesions is still challenging dues to problems such as blurred borders, which requires an accurate and automatic skin lesion segmentation method. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework which can perform skin lesion segmentation automatically and efficiently, called the CSARM-CNN (Channel & Spatial Attention Residual Module) model. Each CSARM block of the model combines channel attention and spatial attention to form a new attention module to enhance segmentation results. The multi-scale input images are obtained by the spatial pyramid pooling. Finally, a weighted cross-entropy loss function is used at each side of the output layer to sum the total loss of the model. We evaluated in two published standard datasets, ISIC 2017 and PH2, and achieved competitive results in terms of specificity and accuracy, with 99.03% and 99.45% specificity, 94.96% and 95.23% accuracy, respectively.