CI-Net: Clinical-Inspired Network for Automated Skin Lesion Recognition

The lesion recognition of dermoscopy images is significant for automated skin cancer diagnosis. Most of the existing methods ignore the medical perspective, which is crucial since this task requires a large amount of medical knowledge. A few methods are designed according to medical knowledge, but they ignore to be fully in line with doctors' entire learning and diagnosis process, since certain strategies and steps of those are conducted in practice for doctors. Thus, we put forward Clinical-Inspired Network (CI-Net) to involve the learning strategy and diagnosis process of doctors, as for a better analysis. The diagnostic process contains three main steps: the zoom step, the observe step and the compare step. To simulate these, we introduce three corresponding modules: a lesion area attention module, a feature extraction module and a lesion feature attention module. To simulate the distinguish strategy, which is commonly used by doctors, we introduce a distinguish module. We evaluate our proposed CI-Net on six challenging datasets, including ISIC 2016, ISIC 2017, ISIC 2018, ISIC 2019, ISIC 2020 and PH2 datasets, and the results indicate that CI-Net outperforms existing work. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/lzh19961031/Dermoscopy_classification.