In the realm of medical image processing, the segmentation of dermatological lesions is a pivotal technique for the early detection of skin cancer. However, existing methods for segmenting images of skin lesions often encounter limitations when dealing with intricate boundaries and diverse lesion shapes. To address these challenges, we propose VMPANet, designed to accurately localize critical targets and capture edge structures. VMPANet employs an inverted pyramid convolution to extract multi-scale features while utilizing the visual Mamba module to capture long-range dependencies among image features. Additionally, we leverage previously extracted masks as cues to facilitate efficient feature propagation. Furthermore, VMPANet integrates parallel depthwise separable convolutions to enhance feature extraction and introduces innovative mechanisms for edge enhancement, spatial attention, and channel attention to adaptively extract edge information and complex spatial relationships. Notably, VMPANet refines a novel cross-attention mechanism, which effectively facilitates the interaction between deep semantic cues and shallow texture details, thereby generating comprehensive feature representations while reducing computational load and redundancy. We conducted comparative and ablation experiments on two public skin lesion datasets (ISIC2017 and ISIC2018). The results demonstrate that VMPANet outperforms existing mainstream methods. On the ISIC2017 dataset, its mIoU and DSC metrics are 1.38% and 0.83% higher than those of VM-Unet respectively; on the ISIC2018 dataset, these metrics are 1.10% and 0.67% higher than those of EMCAD, respectively. Moreover, VMPANet boasts a parameter count of only 0.383 M and a computational load of 1.159 GFLOPs.
Peng et al. (Thu,) studied this question.