HASK-Net: new hybrid attention selective kernel network for automatic colon cancer detection from colonoscopy images

Colorectal cancer is a frequently analyzed cancer type seen today. It is the third leading of cancer in terms of incidence. It is among the second leading cases resulting in death. However, when detecting pre-cancerous polyps using traditional methods, the rate of being overlooked is high. Therefore, the rate of missed polyps can be greatly reduced with deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) methods. In this study, a novel convolutional neural network based on CADx, called HASK-Net, is proposed for automatic polyp detection. While HASK-Net uses ResNet50 as a feature extractor in the encoder network, the novely designed hybrid attention selective kernel convolution uses it in the decoder network to increase the representation power in feature maps and learn more complex features. In experimental results on the publicly available Hiper-Kvasir and EndoTech 2020 benchmark datasets, HASK-Net showed extremely promising performance with a dice similarity score of 97.02% and 84.83% and an mIoU score of 95.38% and 84.32%, respectively.