{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/skin-lesion-classification-using-cnns-with","title":"Skin Lesion Classification Using CNNs with Patch-Based Attention and Diagnosis-Guided Loss Weighting","arxiv_id":"1905.02793","date":"2019-05-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nils Gessert","Thilo Sentker","Frederic Madesta","Rüdiger Schmitz","Helge Kniep","Ivo Baltruschat","René Werner","Alexander Schlaefer"],"abstract":"Objective: This work addresses two key problems of skin lesion classification. The first problem is the effective use of high-resolution images with pretrained standard architectures for image classification. The second problem is the high class imbalance encountered in real-world multi-class datasets. Methods: To use high-resolution images, we propose a novel patch-based attention architecture that provides global context between small, high-resolution patches. We modify three pretrained architectures and study the performance of patch-based attention. To counter class imbalance problems, we compare oversampling, balanced batch sampling, and class-specific loss weighting. Additionally, we propose a novel diagnosis-guided loss weighting method which takes the method used for ground-truth annotation into account. Results: Our patch-based attention mechanism outperforms previous methods and improves the mean sensitivity by 7%. Class balancing significantly improves the mean sensitivity and we show that our diagnosis-guided loss weighting method improves the mean sensitivity by 3% over normal loss balancing. Conclusion: The novel patch-based attention mechanism can be integrated into pretrained architectures and provides global context between local patches while outperforming other patch-based methods. Hence, pretrained architectures can be readily used with high-resolution images without downsampling. The new diagnosis-guided loss weighting method outperforms other methods and allows for effective training when facing class imbalance. Significance: The proposed methods improve automatic skin lesion classification. They can be extended to other clinical applications where high-resolution image data and class imbalance are relevant.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02793v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.02793v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"skin-lesion-classification-using-cnns-with","repo_url":"https://github.com/ngessert/patch-lesion","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"classification","task_name":"General Classification"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"lesion-classification","task_name":"Lesion Classification"},{"task_slug":"sensitivity","task_name":"Sensitivity"},{"task_slug":"skin-lesion-classification","task_name":"Skin Lesion Classification"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}