DM-CNN: Dynamic Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network with uncertainty quantification for medical image classification

Convolutional neural network (CNN) has promoted the development of diagnosis technology of medical images. However, the performance of CNN is limited by insufficient feature information and inaccurate attention weight. Previous works have improved the accuracy and speed of CNN but ignored the uncertainty of the prediction, that is to say, uncertainty of CNN has not received enough attention. Therefore, it is still a great challenge for extracting effective features and uncertainty quantification of medical deep learning models In order to solve the above problems, this paper proposes a novel convolutional neural network model named DM-CNN, which mainly contains the four proposed sub-modules : dynamic multi-scale feature fusion module (DMFF), hierarchical dynamic uncertainty quantifies attention (HDUQ-Attention) and multi-scale fusion pooling method (MF Pooling) and multi-objective loss (MO loss). DMFF select different convolution kernels according to the feature maps at different levels, extract different-scale feature information, and make the feature information of each layer have stronger representation ability for information fusion HDUQ-Attention includes a tuning block that adjust the attention weight according to the different information of each layer, and a Monte-Carlo (MC) dropout structure for quantifying uncertainty MF Pooling is a pooling method designed for multi-scale models, which can speed up the calculation and prevent overfitting while retaining the main important information Because the number of parameters in the backbone part of DM-CNN is different from other modules, MO loss is proposed, which has a fast optimization speed and good classification effect DM-CNN conducts experiments on publicly available datasets in four areas of medicine (Dermatology, Histopathology, Respirology, Ophthalmology), achieving state-of-the-art classification performance on all datasets. DM-CNN can not only maintain excellent performance, but also solve the problem of quantification of uncertainty, which is a very important task for the medical field. The code is available: https://github.com/QIANXIN22/DM-CNN.