DBNet-SI: Dual branch network of shift window attention and inception structure for skin lesion segmentation.

Journal: Computers in biology and medicine
Published Date:

Abstract

The U-shaped convolutional neural network (CNN) has attained remarkable achievements in the segmentation of skin lesion. However, given the inherent locality of convolution, this architecture cannot capture long-range pixel dependencies and multiscale global contextual information effectively. Moreover, repeated convolutions and downsampling operations can readily result in the omission of intricate local fine-grained details. In this paper, we proposed a U-shaped network (DBNet-SI) equipped with a dual-branch module that combines shift window attention and inception structures. First, we proposed a dual-branch module that combines shift window attention and inception structures (MSI) to better capture multiscale global contextual information and long-range pixel dependencies. Specifically, we have devised a cross-branch bidirectional interaction module within the MSI module to enable information complementarity between the two branches in the channel and spatial dimensions. Therefore, MSI is capable of extracting distinguishing and comprehensive features to accurately identify the skin lesion boundaries. Second, we have devised a progressive feature enhancement and information compensation module (PFEIC), which progressively compensates for fine-grained features through reconstructed skip connections and integrated global context attention modules. The results of the experiment show the superior segmentation performance of DBNet-SI compared with other deep learning models for skin lesion segmentation in the ISIC2017 and ISIC2018 datasets. Ablation studies demonstrate that our model can effectively extract rich multiscale global contextual information and compensate for the loss of local details.

Authors

  • Xuqiong Luo
    School of Mathematics and Statistics, Changsha University of Science and Technology, ChangSha 410114, China.
  • Hao Zhang
    College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Henan Agricultural University, Zhengzhou, 450002, China.
  • Xiaofei Huang
    School of Mathematics and Statistics, Changsha University of Science and Technology, ChangSha 410114, China.
  • Hongfang Gong
    School of Mathematics and Statistics, Changsha University of Science and Technology, ChangSha 410114, China. Electronic address: ghongfang@126.com.
  • Jin Zhang
    Department of Otolaryngology, The Second People's Hospital of Yibin, Yibin, Sichuan, China.