Few-shot skin lesion classification with Adaptive Multi-Scale Convolutional Attention Network

HuiYing Jin, E Liu, Qin Xu, YuChen Li, XiaoLiang Chen and WeiHua Chen

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 6, 1-24

Abstract: Computer-aided diagnosis of skin lesions faces core challenges, including scale diversity, blurred boundaries, intra-class morphological variations, and sparse data. Existing methods often rely on fixed receptive fields or generic attention mechanisms, struggling to fully adapt to the unique characteristics of skin lesions. To address this, we propose an Adaptive Multi-scale Convolutional Attention Network (AMCANet), which aims to achieve accurate and robust classification of skin lesions with limited data. AMCANet comprises three core modules: the adaptive multi-scale convolution module dynamically adjusts the receptive field to accommodate lesions of varying sizes; the hierarchical channel attention module integrates multi-level semantic information across different resolutions; and the skin spatial attention module leverages image gradient information to enhance lesion boundaries and local texture features. Extensive few-shot experiments on the HAM10000 and PAD-UFES-20 public datasets demonstrate that AMCANet significantly outperforms existing baseline models across multiple metrics, exhibiting promising generalization capabilities on the evaluated datasets. Qualitative and visual analyses further validate the model’s ability to extract discriminative features and effectively focus on lesion regions. This study proposes a deep learning model, which demonstrates certain effectiveness in classifying skin lesions even with a small number of samples, providing a potential direction for future research.

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0351318

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0351318

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