Generative Adversarial Networks based Skin Lesion Segmentation

Skin cancer is a serious condition that requires accurate diagnosis and treatment. One way to assist clinicians in this task is using computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) tools that automatically segment skin lesions from dermoscopic images. We propose a novel adversarial learning-based framework called Efficient-GAN (EGAN) that uses an unsupervised generative network to generate accurate lesion masks. It consists of a generator module with a top-down squeeze excitation-based compound scaled path, an asymmetric lateral connection-based bottom-up path, and a discriminator module that distinguishes between original and synthetic masks. A morphology-based smoothing loss is also implemented to encourage the network to create smooth semantic boundaries of lesions. The framework is evaluated on the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) Lesion Dataset 2018. It outperforms the current state-of-the-art skin lesion segmentation approaches with a Dice coefficient, Jaccard similarity, and Accuracy of 90.1%, 83.6%, and 94.5%, respectively. We also design a lightweight segmentation framework (MGAN) that achieves comparable performance as EGAN but with an order of magnitude lower number of training parameters, thus resulting in faster inference times for low compute resource settings.