U-Net-based Models for Skin Lesion Segmentation: More Attention and Augmentation

Abstract: According to WHO[1], since the 1970s, diagnosis of melanoma skin cancer has been more frequent. However, if detected early, the 5-year survival rate for melanoma can increase to 99 percent. In this regard, skin lesion segmentation can be pivotal in monitoring and treatment planning. In this work, ten models and four augmentation configurations are trained on the ISIC 2016 dataset. The performance and overfitting are compared utilizing five metrics. Our results show that the U-Net-Resnet50 and the R2U-Net have the highest metrics value, along with two data augmentation scenarios. We also investigate CBAM and AG blocks in the U-Net architecture, which enhances segmentation performance at a meager computational cost. In addition, we propose using pyramid, AG, and CBAM blocks in a sequence, which significantly surpasses the results of using the two individually. Finally, our experiments show that models that have exploited attention modules successfully overcome common skin lesion segmentation problems. Lastly, in the spirit of reproducible research, we implement models and codes publicly available.