Attention Res-UNet: Attention Residual UNet With Focal Tversky Loss for Skin Lesion Segmentation

During a dermoscopy examination, accurate and automatic skin lesion detection and segmentation can assist medical experts in resecting problematic areas and decrease the risk of deaths due to skin cancer. In order to develop fully automated deep learning model for skin lesion segmentation, the authors design a model Attention Res-UNet by incorporating residual connections, squeeze and excite units, atrous spatial pyramid pooling, and attention gates in basic UNet architecture. This model uses focal tversky loss function to achieve better trade off among recall and precision when training on smaller size lesions while improving the overall outcome of the proposed model. The results of experiments have demonstrated that this design, when evaluated on publicly available ISIC 2018 skin lesion segmentation dataset, outperforms the existing standard methods with a Dice score of 89.14% and IoU of 81.16%; and achieves better trade off among precision and recall. The authors have also performed statistical test of this model with other standard methods and evaluated that this model is statistically significant.