Double-Condensing Attention Condenser: Leveraging Attention in Deep Learning to Detect Skin Cancer from Skin Lesion Images
This work addresses the need for more efficient and tractable deep learning models for skin cancer detection, potentially aiding clinicians, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing attention mechanisms for a specific domain.
The paper tackles skin cancer detection from lesion images by introducing a Double-Condensing Attention Condenser integrated into a self-attention neural network to improve efficiency, achieving competitive performance with reduced storage and compute costs compared to complex ensemble methods.
Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer in the United States and is estimated to affect one in five Americans. Recent advances have demonstrated strong performance on skin cancer detection, as exemplified by state of the art performance in the SIIM-ISIC Melanoma Classification Challenge; however these solutions leverage ensembles of complex deep neural architectures requiring immense storage and compute costs, and therefore may not be tractable. A recent movement for TinyML applications is integrating Double-Condensing Attention Condensers (DC-AC) into a self-attention neural network backbone architecture to allow for faster and more efficient computation. This paper explores leveraging an efficient self-attention structure to detect skin cancer in skin lesion images and introduces a deep neural network design with DC-AC customized for skin cancer detection from skin lesion images. The final model is publicly available as a part of a global open-source initiative dedicated to accelerating advancement in machine learning to aid clinicians in the fight against cancer. Future work of this research includes iterating on the design of the selected network architecture and refining the approach to generalize to other forms of cancer.