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Serial attention network for skin lesion segmentation

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Abstract

Due to the influence of color, boundaries, and shapes of melanoma, the segmentation of the lesion area is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a method to connect two attention modules (channel attention and spatial attention) serially and embed them into the skip connection of the encoder–decoder network. Different from previous work on image segmentation through attention mechanism, we have made a different combination of the existing popular spatial attention module and channel attention module. The experimental results show that the sequence combinations with channel attention in front and spatial attention in the rear are more likely to aggregate global and local information as well as information between channels than other combinations. Our method achieved an average Jaccard Index of 0.7692 on the ISIC2017 dataset. 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.

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Acknowledgements

This research is partially supported by Science and Technology Department of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Fund Project (2020E0234), and Department of Education, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (CN) Postgraduate Research and Innovation Project (XJ2020G072). We would also like to thank our tutor for the careful guidance and all the participants for their insightful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Software, Xinjiang University, Urumqi, 830000, China

    Yuan Ren, Shengwei Tian, Zhiqi Guo & Yanhan Zhang

  2. Key Laboratory of Software Engineering Technology, Xinjiang University, Urumqi, 830000, China

    Yuan Ren, Shengwei Tian, Junlong Cheng, Zhiqi Guo & Yanhan Zhang

  3. Network Center, Xinjiang University, Urumqi, 830046, China

    Long Yu

  4. College of Information Science and Engineering, Xinjiang University, Urumqi, 830000, China

    Junlong Cheng

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  1. Yuan Ren
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  2. Long Yu
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  5. Zhiqi Guo
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  6. Yanhan Zhang
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Correspondence to Long Yu.

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Ren, Y., Yu, L., Tian, S. et al. Serial attention network for skin lesion segmentation. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 13, 799–810 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-021-02933-3

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