TC-Net: Dual coding network of Transformer and CNN for skin lesion segmentation

PLoS One. 2022 Nov 21;17(11):e0277578. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0277578. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

Skin lesion segmentation has become an essential recent direction in machine learning for medical applications. In a deep learning segmentation network, the convolutional neural network (CNN) uses convolution to capture local information for modeling. However, it ignores the relationship between pixels and still can not meet the precise segmentation requirements of some complex low contrast datasets. Transformer performs well in modeling global feature information, but their ability to extract fine-grained local feature patterns is weak. In this work, The dual coding fusion network architecture Transformer and CNN (TC-Net), as an architecture that can more accurately combine local feature information and global feature information, can improve the segmentation performance of skin images. The results of this work demonstrate that the combination of CNN and Transformer brings very significant improvement in global segmentation performance and allows outperformance as compared to the pure single network model. The experimental results and visual analysis of these three datasets quantitatively and qualitatively illustrate the robustness of TC-Net. Compared with Swin UNet, on the ISIC2018 dataset, it has increased by 2.46% in the dice index and about 4% in the JA index. On the ISBI2017 dataset, the dice and JA indices rose by about 4%.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted* / methods
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Skin Diseases* / diagnostic imaging

Grants and funding

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation of China under Grant U1903213, and the Natural Science Foundation of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region grant number 2022D01C82. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.