Zuo Lihan, Wang Zizhou, Wang Yan
School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610000, PR China.
Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore 138632, Singapore.
Artif Intell Med. 2025 Apr;162:103091. doi: 10.1016/j.artmed.2025.103091. Epub 2025 Feb 19.
Skin cancer is frequently occurring and has become a major contributor to both cancer incidence and mortality. Accurate and timely diagnosis of skin cancer holds the potential to save lives. Deep learning-based methods have demonstrated significant advancements in the screening of skin cancers. However, most current approaches rely on a single modality input for diagnosis, thereby missing out on valuable complementary information that could enhance accuracy. Although some multimodal-based methods exist, they often lack adaptability and fail to fully leverage multimodal information. In this paper, we introduce a novel uncertainty-based hybrid fusion strategy for a multi-modal learning algorithm aimed at skin cancer diagnosis. Our approach specifically combines three different modalities: clinical images, dermoscopy images, and metadata, to make the final classification. For the fusion of two image modalities, we employ an intermediate fusion strategy that considers the similarity between clinical and dermoscopy images to extract features containing both complementary and correlated information. To capture the correlated information, we utilize cosine similarity, and we employ concatenation as the means for integrating complementary information. In the fusion of image and metadata modalities, we leverage uncertainty to obtain confident late fusion results, allowing our method to adaptively combine the information from different modalities. We conducted comprehensive experiments using a popular publicly available skin disease diagnosis dataset, and the results of these experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our proposed fusion algorithm could enhance the clinical applicability of automated skin lesion classification, offering a more robust and adaptive way to make automatic diagnoses with the help of uncertainty mechanism. Code is available at https://github.com/Zuo-Lihan/CosCatNet-Adaptive_Fusion_Algorithm.
皮肤癌发病率很高,已成为癌症发病率和死亡率的主要促成因素。准确及时地诊断皮肤癌有可能挽救生命。基于深度学习的方法在皮肤癌筛查方面已取得显著进展。然而,当前大多数方法依靠单一模态输入进行诊断,从而遗漏了可能提高准确性的宝贵补充信息。尽管存在一些基于多模态的方法,但它们往往缺乏适应性,无法充分利用多模态信息。在本文中,我们针对皮肤癌诊断的多模态学习算法引入了一种基于不确定性的新型混合融合策略。我们的方法具体结合了三种不同的模态:临床图像、皮肤镜图像和元数据,以进行最终分类。对于两种图像模态的融合,我们采用一种中间融合策略,该策略考虑临床图像和皮肤镜图像之间的相似性,以提取包含补充信息和相关信息的特征。为了捕获相关信息,我们利用余弦相似度,并采用拼接作为整合补充信息的方式。在图像和元数据模态的融合中,我们利用不确定性来获得可靠的后期融合结果,使我们的方法能够自适应地组合来自不同模态的信息。我们使用一个流行的公开可用皮肤病诊断数据集进行了全面实验,这些实验结果证明了我们提出的方法的有效性。我们提出的融合算法可以提高自动皮肤病变分类的临床适用性,借助不确定性机制提供一种更强大、更具适应性的自动诊断方法。代码可在https://github.com/Zuo-Lihan/CosCatNet-Adaptive_Fusion_Algorithm获取。