HSH-UNet: Hybrid selective high order interactive U-shaped model for automated skin lesion segmentation

The use of computer-assisted clinical dermatologists to diagnose skin diseases is an important aid. And computer-assisted techniques mainly use deep neural networks. Recently, the proposal of higher-order spatial interaction operations in deep neural networks has attracted a lot of attention. It has the advantages of both convolution and transformers, and additionally has the advantages of efficient, extensible and translation-equivariant. However, the selection of the interaction order in higher-order interaction operations requires tedious manual selection of a suitable interaction order. In this paper, a hybrid selective higher-order interaction U-shaped model HSH-UNet is proposed to solve the problem that requires manual selection of the order. Specifically, we design a hybrid selective high-order interaction module HSHB embedded in the U-shaped model. The HSHB adaptively selects the appropriate order for the interaction operation channel-by-channel under the computationally obtained guiding features. The hybrid order interaction also solves the problem of fixed order of interaction at each level. We performed extensive experiments on three public skin lesion datasets and our own dataset to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The ablation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our hybrid selective higher order interaction module. The comparison with state-of-the-art methods also demonstrates the superiority of our proposed HSH-UNet performance. The code is available at https://github.com/wurenkai/HSH-UNet.