Papers › A Novel Focal Tversky loss function with improved Attention U-Net for lesion segmentation

A Novel Focal Tversky loss function with improved Attention U-Net for lesion segmentation

18 Oct 2018arXiv:1810.07842archive 2025-07-28

Nabila Abraham, Naimul Mefraz Khan

We propose a generalized focal loss function based on the Tversky index to address the issue of data imbalance in medical image segmentation. Compared to the commonly used Dice loss, our loss function achieves a better trade off between precision and recall when training on small structures such as lesions. To evaluate our loss function, we improve the attention U-Net model by incorporating an image pyramid to preserve contextual features. We experiment on the BUS 2017 dataset and ISIC 2018 dataset where lesions occupy 4.84% and 21.4% of the images area and improve segmentation accuracy when compared to the standard U-Net by 25.7% and 3.6%, respectively.

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Code

nabsabraham/focal-tversky-unet officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtf report
EvgenyDyshlyuk/Oil_Seep_Detection mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
Jo-dsa/SemanticSeg mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
woans0104/project_review mentioned on GitHub report
woans0104/sk_project mentioned on GitHub report

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Tasks

Image SegmentationLesion SegmentationMedical Image SegmentationSegmentationSemantic SegmentationSkin Lesion Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Lesion Segmentation BUS 2017 Dataset B Attn U-Net + Multi-Input + FTL Dice Score 0.804 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Lesion Segmentation BUS 2017 Dataset B U-Net + FTL Dice Score 0.669 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Lesion Segmentation BUS 2017 Dataset B Attn U-Net + DL Dice Score 0.615 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Lesion Segmentation ISIC 2018 Attn U-Net + Multi-Input + FTL mean Dice 0.856 #12 of 17 Archive leaderboard report
Lesion Segmentation ISIC 2018 U-Net + FTL mean Dice 0.829 #15 of 17 Archive leaderboard report
Lesion Segmentation ISIC 2018 Attn U-Net + DL mean Dice 0.806 #16 of 17 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Concatenated Skip ConnectionConvolutionFocal LossMax PoolingReLUU-Net

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