A Novel Multi-task Model Imitating Dermatologists for Accurate Differential Diagnosis of Skin Diseases in Clinical Images

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Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2023 (MICCAI 2023)

Abstract

Skin diseases are among the most prevalent health issues, and accurate computer-aided diagnosis methods are of importance for both dermatologists and patients. However, most of the existing methods overlook the essential domain knowledge required for skin disease diagnosis. A novel multi-task model, namely DermImitFormer, is proposed to fill this gap by imitating dermatologists’ diagnostic procedures and strategies. Through multi-task learning, the model simultaneously predicts body parts and lesion attributes in addition to the disease itself, enhancing diagnosis accuracy and improving diagnosis interpretability. The designed lesion selection module mimics dermatologists’ zoom-in action, effectively highlighting the local lesion features from noisy backgrounds. Additionally, the presented cross-interaction module explicitly models the complicated diagnostic reasoning between body parts, lesion attributes, and diseases. To provide a more robust evaluation of the proposed method, a large-scale clinical image dataset of skin diseases with significantly more cases than existing datasets has been established. Extensive experiments on three different datasets consistently demonstrate the state-of-the-art recognition performance of the proposed approach.

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Acknowledgement

This work was supported by National Key R &D Program of China (2020YFC2008703) and the Project of Intelligent Management Software for Multimodal Medical Big Data for New Generation Information Technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People’s Republic of China (TC210804V).

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Correspondence to Yan-Jie Zhou or Yu Wang .

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Zhou, YJ. et al. (2023). A Novel Multi-task Model Imitating Dermatologists for Accurate Differential Diagnosis of Skin Diseases in Clinical Images. In: Greenspan, H., et al. Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2023. MICCAI 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14225. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43987-2_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43987-2_20

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