# Single-Shared Network with Prior-Inspired Loss for Parameter-Efficient Multi-Modal Imaging Skin Lesion Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19203 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19203/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Averaging Weights Leads to Wider Optima and Better Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05407/) (2018)
- [PAD-UFES-20: a skin lesion dataset composed of patient data and clinical images collected from smartphones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00478/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Equivalence of Siamese Self-Supervised Learning via A Unified Gradient Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05141/) (2021)
- [Learning Where to Learn in Cross-View Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14898/) (2022)
- [Learning Deep Multimodal Feature Representation with Asymmetric Multi-layer Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05009/) (2021)
- [Single Model Deep Learning on Imbalanced Small Datasets for Skin Lesion Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01284/) (2021)
- [TFormer: A throughout fusion transformer for multi-modal skin lesion diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11393/) (2022)
- [Graph-Based Intercategory and Intermodality Network for Multilabel Classification and Melanoma Diagnosis of Skin Lesions in Dermoscopy and Clinical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00201/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale Weight Sharing Network for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02816/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this study, we introduce a multi-modal approach that efficiently integrates multi-scale clinical and dermoscopy features within a single network, thereby substantially reducing model parameters. The proposed method includes three novel fusion schemes. Firstly, unlike current methods that usually employ two individual models for for clinical and dermoscopy modalities, we verified that multimodal feature can be learned by sharing the parameters of encoder while leaving the individual modal-specific classifiers. Secondly, the shared cross-attention module can replace the individual one to efficiently interact between two modalities at multiple layers. Thirdly, different from current methods that equally optimize dermoscopy and clinical branches, inspired by prior knowledge that dermoscopy images play a more significant role than clinical images, we propose a novel biased loss. This loss guides the single-shared network to prioritize dermoscopy information over clinical information, implicitly learning a better joint feature representation for the modal-specific task. Extensive experiments on a well-recognized Seven-Point Checklist (SPC) dataset and a collected dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both CNN and Transformer structures. Furthermore, our method exhibits superiority in both accuracy and model parameters compared to currently advanced methods.