LiteMamba-Bound: A lightweight Mamba-based model with boundary-aware and normalized active contour loss for skin lesion segmentation

In the field of medical science, skin segmentation has gained significant importance, particularly in dermatology and skin cancer research. This domain demands high precision in distinguishing critical regions (such as lesions or moles) from healthy skin in medical images. With growing technological advancements, deep learning models have emerged as indispensable tools in addressing these challenges. One of the state-of-the-art modules revealed in recent years, the 2D Selective Scan (SS2D), based on state-space models that have already seen great success in natural language processing, has been increasingly adopted and is gradually replacing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). Leveraging the strength of this module, this paper introduces LiteMamba-Bound, a lightweight model with approximately 957K parameters, designed for skin image segmentation tasks. Notably, the Channel Attention Dual Mamba (CAD-Mamba) block is proposed within both the encoder and decoder alongside the Mix Convolution with Simple Attention bottleneck block to emphasize key features. Additionally, we propose the Reverse Attention Boundary Module to highlight challenging boundary features. Also, the Normalized Active Contour loss function presented in this paper significantly improves the model's performance compared to other loss functions. To validate performance, we conducted tests on two skin image datasets, ISIC2018 and PH2, with results consistently showing superior performance compared to other models. Our code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/kwanghwi242/A-new-segmentation-model.