Investigating deep side layers for skin lesion segmentation

Accurate skin lesion segmentation is an important yet challenging problem for medical image analysis. The skin lesion segmentation is subject to variety of challenges such as the significant pattern and colour diversity found within the lesions, presence of various artifacts, etc. In this paper, we present two fully convolutional networks with several side outputs to take advantage of discriminative capability of features learned at intermediate layers with varying resolutions and scales for the lesion segmentation. More specifically, we integrate fine and coarse prediction scores of the side-layers which allows our framework to not only output accurate probability map for the lesion, but also extract fine lesion boundary details such as the fuzzy border, which further improves the lesion segmentation. Quantitative evaluation is performed on the 2016 International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2016) dataset, which shows our proposed approach compares favorably with state-of-the-art skin segmentation methods.