{"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/soft-attention-improves-skin-cancer","title":"Soft-Attention Improves Skin Cancer Classification Performance","arxiv_id":"2105.03358","date":"2021-05-05","proceeding":null,"authors":["Soumyya Kanti Datta","Mohammad Abuzar Shaikh","Sargur N. Srihari","Mingchen Gao"],"abstract":"In clinical applications, neural networks must focus on and highlight the most important parts of an input image. Soft-Attention mechanism enables a neural network toachieve this goal. This paper investigates the effectiveness of Soft-Attention in deep neural architectures. The central aim of Soft-Attention is to boost the value of important features and suppress the noise-inducing features. We compare the performance of VGG, ResNet, InceptionResNetv2 and DenseNet architectures with and without the Soft-Attention mechanism, while classifying skin lesions. The original network when coupled with Soft-Attention outperforms the baseline[16] by 4.7% while achieving a precision of 93.7% on HAM10000 dataset [25]. Additionally, Soft-Attention coupling improves the sensitivity score by 3.8% compared to baseline[31] and achieves 91.6% on ISIC-2017 dataset [2]. The code is publicly available at github.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.03358v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.03358v3.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":"soft-attention-improves-skin-cancer","repo_url":"https://github.com/skrantidatta/Attention-based-Skin-Cancer-Classification","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"cancer-classification","task_name":"Cancer Classification"},{"task_slug":"classification-1","task_name":"Classification"},{"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":"skin-cancer-classification","task_name":"Skin Cancer Classification"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"1x1-convolution","method_name":"1x1 Convolution"},{"method_slug":"3d-sa","method_name":"3D SA"},{"method_slug":"average-pooling","method_name":"Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"batch-normalization","method_name":"Batch Normalization"},{"method_slug":"bottleneck-residual-block","method_name":"Bottleneck Residual Block"},{"method_slug":"concatenated-skip-connection","method_name":"Concatenated Skip Connection"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"dense-block","method_name":"Dense Block"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"global-average-pooling","method_name":"Global Average Pooling"},{"method_slug":"kaiming-initialization","method_name":"Kaiming Initialization"},{"method_slug":"max-pooling","method_name":"Max Pooling"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"residual-block","method_name":"Residual Block"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}