EAAC-Net: An Efficient Adaptive Attention and Convolution Fusion Network for Skin Lesion Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of skin lesions in dermoscopic images is of key importance for quantitative analysis of melanoma. Although existing medical image segmentation methods significantly improve skin lesion segmentation, they still have limitations in extracting local features with global information, do not handle challenging lesions well, and usually have a large number of parameters and high computational complexity. To address these issues, this paper proposes an efficient adaptive attention and convolutional fusion network for skin lesion segmentation (EAAC-Net). We designed two parallel encoders, where the efficient adaptive attention feature extraction module (EAAM) adaptively establishes global spatial dependence and global channel dependence by constructing the adjacency matrix of the directed graph and can adaptively filter out the least relevant tokens at the coarse-grained region level, thus reducing the computational complexity of the self-attention mechanism. The efficient multiscale attention-based convolution module (EMA⋅C) utilizes multiscale attention for cross-space learning of local features extracted from the convolutional layer to enhance the representation of richly detailed local features. In addition, we designed a reverse attention feature fusion module (RAFM) to enhance the effective boundary information gradually. To validate the performance of our proposed network, we compared it with other methods on ISIC 2016, ISIC 2018, and PH² public datasets, and the experimental results show that EAAC-Net has superior segmentation performance under commonly used evaluation metrics.