Skin diseases affect millions worldwide.Early detection is key to preventing disfigurement,lifelong disability,or death.Dermoscopic images acquired in primary-care settings show high intra-class visual similarity and ...Skin diseases affect millions worldwide.Early detection is key to preventing disfigurement,lifelong disability,or death.Dermoscopic images acquired in primary-care settings show high intra-class visual similarity and severe class imbalance,and occasional imaging artifacts can create ambiguity for state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks(CNNs).We frame skin lesion recognition as graph-based reasoning and,to ensure fair evaluation and avoid data leakage,adopt a strict lesion-level partitioning strategy.Each image is first over-segmented using SLIC(Simple Linear Iterative Clustering)to produce perceptually homogeneous superpixels.These superpixels form the nodes of a region-adjacency graph whose edges encode spatial continuity.Node attributes are 1280-dimensional embeddings extracted with a lightweight yet expressive EfficientNet-B0 backbone,providing strong representational power at modest computational cost.The resulting graphs are processed by a five-layer Graph Attention Network(GAT)that learns to weight inter-node relationships dynamically and aggregates multi-hop context before classifying lesions into seven classes with a log-softmax output.Extensive experiments on the DermaMNIST benchmark show the proposed pipeline achieves 88.35%accuracy and 98.04%AUC,outperforming contemporary CNNs,AutoML approaches,and alternative graph neural networks.An ablation study indicates EfficientNet-B0 produces superior node descriptors compared with ResNet-18 and DenseNet,and that roughly five GAT layers strike a good balance between being too shallow and over-deep while avoiding oversmoothing.The method requires no data augmentation or external metadata,making it a drop-in upgrade for clinical computer-aided diagnosis systems.展开更多
基金funded by the Deanship of Graduate Studies and Scientific Research at Jouf University under grant No.(DGSSR-2025-02-01296).
文摘Skin diseases affect millions worldwide.Early detection is key to preventing disfigurement,lifelong disability,or death.Dermoscopic images acquired in primary-care settings show high intra-class visual similarity and severe class imbalance,and occasional imaging artifacts can create ambiguity for state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks(CNNs).We frame skin lesion recognition as graph-based reasoning and,to ensure fair evaluation and avoid data leakage,adopt a strict lesion-level partitioning strategy.Each image is first over-segmented using SLIC(Simple Linear Iterative Clustering)to produce perceptually homogeneous superpixels.These superpixels form the nodes of a region-adjacency graph whose edges encode spatial continuity.Node attributes are 1280-dimensional embeddings extracted with a lightweight yet expressive EfficientNet-B0 backbone,providing strong representational power at modest computational cost.The resulting graphs are processed by a five-layer Graph Attention Network(GAT)that learns to weight inter-node relationships dynamically and aggregates multi-hop context before classifying lesions into seven classes with a log-softmax output.Extensive experiments on the DermaMNIST benchmark show the proposed pipeline achieves 88.35%accuracy and 98.04%AUC,outperforming contemporary CNNs,AutoML approaches,and alternative graph neural networks.An ablation study indicates EfficientNet-B0 produces superior node descriptors compared with ResNet-18 and DenseNet,and that roughly five GAT layers strike a good balance between being too shallow and over-deep while avoiding oversmoothing.The method requires no data augmentation or external metadata,making it a drop-in upgrade for clinical computer-aided diagnosis systems.
