Convolutional Neural Network with Multiscale Fusion and Attention Mechanism for Skin Diseases Assisted Diagnosis

Melanoma segmentation based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) has recently attracted extensive attention. However, the features captured by CNN are always local that result in discontinuous feature extraction. To solve this problem, we propose a novel multiscale feature fusion network (MSFA-Net). MSFA-Net can extract feature information at different scales through a multiscale feature fusion structure (MSF) in the network and then calibrate and restore the extracted information to achieve the purpose of melanoma segmentation. Specifically, based on the popular encoder-decoder structure, we designed three functional modules, namely MSF, asymmetric skip connection structure (ASCS), and calibration decoder (Decoder). In addition, a weighted cross-entropy loss and two-stage learning rate optimization strategy are designed to train the network more effectively. Compared qualitatively and quantitatively with the representative neural network methods with encoder-decoder structure, such as U-Net, the proposed method can achieve advanced performance.