Soft-Attention Improves Skin Cancer Classification Performance
arXiv:2105. 03358v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In clinical applications, neural networks must focus on and highlight the most important parts of an input image.
The paper introduces a lightweight attention-based CNN (CNN-Attention) for binary skin cancer classification that uses channel attention to highlight informative dermoscopic regions while keeping computational demands low. Trained on a dataset of 2,637 images, the model achieved 87 % accuracy, 0.9475 ROC AUC, and 0.9430 PR AUC, matching MobileNet’s performance with roughly half the parameters and storage. Saliency maps are employed to provide explainability by visualizing the image areas that influence predictions.
arXiv:2105. 03358v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In clinical applications, neural networks must focus on and highlight the most important parts of an input image.
The paper introduces an attention‑guided fusion framework that combines global and lesion‑focused local information for image classification. Using a three‑branch architecture built on DenseNet‑121, the model generates attention maps with Grad‑CAM, refines local features with CBAM, and adaptively fuses the two representations. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets, including skin, guava leaf, and grape leaf images, show that the fusion branch outperforms individual branches, achieving up to 97.75% accuracy on skin lesions and 99.64% on guava leaves.
HierViT is a hierarchical Vision Transformer designed for medical image classification that balances strong predictive performance with interpretability. The model first predicts clinically relevant visual appearance attributes and then uses a hierarchical reasoning process to infer the final diagnosis. Attribute‑specific prototypes and attention maps are visualized to provide complementary views of the model’s reasoning, linking representative image examples and spatial attention to semantically defined visual features.
The study compares five pre‑trained convolutional neural networks—ResNet50, VGG16, VGG19, MobileNet, and InceptionV3—for melanoma detection using dermatoscopic and histopathological image datasets. Accuracy varied across models and modalities, with ResNet50 achieving the highest scores (84% on HAM10000 and 83% on CR‑AI4SkIN) and InceptionV3 the lowest (71% on ISIC 2018). The results show that a model’s performance on dermatoscopic images does not necessarily predict its performance on histopathological images.
arXiv:2608. 11280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Skin cancer diagnosis from dermoscopic images remains challenging due to high intra-class variability, inter-class similarity, class imbalance, and the limited interpretability of deep learning models.
Skin cancer diagnosis from dermoscopic images remains challenging due to high intra-class variability, inter-class similarity, class imbalance, and the limited interpretability of deep learning models. This paper proposes an uncertainty-aware and explainable deep learning framework for multi-class skin lesion classification.
RACR-MIL is a weakly‑supervised method for grading squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) from whole‑slide images, using an attention‑based multiple‑instance learning framework. It introduces a hybrid WSI graph to capture local tissue context and non‑local phenotypic dependencies, and applies rank‑ordering constraints on attention to prioritize higher‑grade tumor regions, mirroring pathologists’ diagnostic reasoning. The approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance, improving SCC grading accuracy by 3–9% over existing methods and up to 10% in tumor localization, and a pilot study showed pathologists reported increased grading efficiency in 60% of cases.
The paper evaluates how well generalist and dermatology-specific machine learning models perform on diverse skin lesion datasets, including dermoscopic images and smartphone photographs. It benchmarks a range of architectures—general-purpose vision-language models, foundation models, and task-specific dermatology classifiers—under conditions of distribution shift, modality change, and demographic variability. The study quantifies the performance gap between current state‑of‑the‑art models and the robustness needed for safe, equitable clinical deployment.
The paper introduces scalable Graph Transformers for classifying healthy versus tumor epithelial cells in whole-slide images of cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma. By constructing a full‑WSI cell graph and incorporating morphological, texture, and neighboring cell class features, the proposed SGFormer and DIFFormer models outperform traditional image‑based methods, achieving balanced accuracies above 85% on single‑WSI tests and 83.6% on multi‑WSI evaluations. The study demonstrates that preserving tissue‑level context through graph representations improves classification of morphologically similar cell types.
The paper presents a lightweight CNN‑integrated Compact Convolutional Transformer (CCT) designed for multi‑scale feature learning in breast cancer mammography. With only 250,435 parameters, the model achieved 99‑100% accuracy across three datasets using 5‑fold cross‑validation, demonstrating robust generalization. Explainable AI components were added to clarify the classification process, aiming to increase clinical trust in resource‑constrained settings.
The paper introduces a Hybrid Cross-Modal Attention Network (HCMAN) that fuses mammogram images with structured clinical data using transformer-based cross‑modal attention. Trained on a locally collected dataset of 2,560 images from 1,024 Ethiopian patients, the model achieves 97.8% accuracy, 97.2% sensitivity, 98.3% specificity, and an AUC of 0.987, outperforming image‑only baselines and maintaining robustness to low‑quality images. Its lightweight design allows inference in under two seconds on a standard CPU, making it suitable for deployment in resource‑limited clinical settings.
The study evaluates ten ImageNet‑pretrained deep learning models for classifying benign versus malignant breast cancer in the BreakHis histopathology dataset, using a patient‑level split. DenseNet121 achieved the highest performance with 99.4% accuracy and an AUC‑ROC of 0.999, outperforming all other models (p < 0.001). Explainability methods (Grad‑CAM, LIME, Integrated Gradients, LRP) consistently identified nuclei‑rich and glandular regions as key diagnostic features, demonstrating that transfer learning combined with explainable AI can produce accurate and interpretable breast cancer diagnostic tools.