Multi-scale Feature Enhancement in Multi-task Learning for Medical Image Analysis

Traditional deep learning methods in medical imaging often focus solely on segmentation or classification, limiting their ability to leverage shared information. Multi-task learning (MTL) addresses this by combining both tasks through shared representations but often struggles to balance local spatial features for segmentation and global semantic features for classification, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective UNet-based MTL model, where features extracted by the encoder are used to predict classification labels, while the decoder produces the segmentation mask. The model introduces an advanced encoder incorporating a novel ResFormer block that integrates local context from convolutional feature extraction with long-range dependencies modeled by the Transformer. This design captures broader contextual relationships and fine-grained details, improving classification and segmentation accuracy. To enhance classification performance, multi-scale features from different encoder levels are combined to leverage the hierarchical representation of the input image. For segmentation, the features passed to the decoder via skip connections are refined using a novel dilated feature enhancement (DFE) module, which captures information at different scales through three parallel convolution branches with varying dilation rates. This allows the decoder to detect lesions of varying sizes with greater accuracy. Experimental results across multiple medical datasets confirm the superior performance of our model in both segmentation and classification tasks, compared to state-of-the-art single-task and multi-task learning methods.