A novel approach to skin disease segmentation using a visual selective state spatial model with integrated spatial constraints.

Abstract

Accurate segmentation of skin lesions is crucial for reliable clinical diagnosis and effective treatment planning. Automated techniques for skin lesion segmentation assist dermatologists in early detection and ongoing monitoring of various skin diseases, ultimately improving patient outcomes and reducing healthcare costs. To address limitations in existing approaches, we introduce a novel U-shaped segmentation architecture based on our Residual Space State Block. This efficient model, termed 'SSR-UNet,' leverages bidirectional scanning to capture both global and local features in image data, achieving strong performance with low computational complexity. Traditional CNNs struggle with long-range dependencies, while Transformers, though excellent at global feature extraction, are computationally intensive and require large amounts of data. Our SSR-UNet model overcomes these challenges by efficiently balancing computational load and feature extraction capabilities. Additionally, we introduce a spatially-constrained loss function that mitigates gradient stability issues by considering the distance between label and prediction boundaries. We rigorously evaluated SSR-UNet on the ISIC2017 and ISIC2018 skin lesion segmentation benchmarks. The results showed that the accuracy of Mean Intersection Over Union, Classification Accuracy and Specificity indexes in ISIC2017 datasets reached 80.98, 96.50 and 98.04, respectively, exceeding the best indexes of other models by 0.83, 0.99 and 0.38, respectively. The accuracy of Mean Intersection Over Union, Dice Coefficient, Classification Accuracy and Sensitivity on ISIC2018 datasets reached 82.17, 90.21, 95.34 and 88.49, respectively, exceeding the best indicators of other models by 1.71, 0.27, 0.65 and 0.04, respectively. It can be seen that SSR-UNet model has excellent performance in most aspects.