A high-order focus interaction model and oral ulcer dataset for oral ulcer segmentation

Computer-aided diagnosis has been slow to develop in the field of oral ulcers. One of the major reasons for this is the lack of publicly available datasets. However, oral ulcers have cancerous lesions and their mortality rate is high. The ability to recognize oral ulcers at an early stage in a timely and effective manner is a very critical issue. In recent years, although there exists a small group of researchers working on these, the datasets are private. Therefore to address this challenge, in this paper a multi-tasking oral ulcer dataset (Autooral) containing two major tasks of lesion segmentation and classification is proposed and made publicly available. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first team to make publicly available an oral ulcer dataset with multi-tasking. In addition, we propose a novel modeling framework, HF-UNet, for segmenting oral ulcer lesion regions. Specifically, the proposed high-order focus interaction module (HFblock) performs acquisition of global properties and focus for acquisition of local properties through high-order attention. The proposed lesion localization module (LL-M) employs a novel hybrid sobel filter, which improves the recognition of ulcer edges. Experimental results on the proposed Autooral dataset show that our proposed HF-UNet segmentation of oral ulcers achieves a DSC value of about 0.80 and the inference memory occupies only 2029 MB. The proposed method guarantees a low running load while maintaining a high-performance segmentation capability. The proposed Autooral dataset and code are available from https://github.com/wurenkai/HF-UNet-and-Autooral-dataset .