IAFI-FCOS: Intra- and across-layer feature interaction FCOS model for lesion detection of CT images

Effective lesion detection in medical image is not only rely on the features of lesion region, but also deeply relative to the surrounding information. However, most current methods have not fully utilize it. What’s more, multi-scale feature fusion mechanism of most traditional detectors are unable to transmit detail information without loss, which makes it hard to detect small and boundary-ambiguous lesion in early stage disease. To address the above issues, we propose a novel intra- and across-layer feature interaction FCOS model (IAFI-FCOS) with a multi-scale feature fusion mechanism ICAF-FPN, which is a network structure with intra-layer context augmentation (ICA) block and across-layer feature weighting (AFW) block. Therefore, the traditional FCOS detector is optimized by enriching the feature representation from two perspectives. Specifically, the ICA block utilizes dilated attention to augment the context information in order to capture long-range dependencies between the lesion region and the surrounding. The AFW block utilizes dual-axis attention mechanism and weighting operation to obtain the efficient across-layer interaction features, enhancing the representation of detailed features. Our approach has been extensively experimented on both the private pancreatic lesion dataset and the public DeepLesion dataset, with AP
50
of 62.2% and 60.0%, respectively, and these results are 6.4% and 2.3% higher than the FCOS. Additionally, our model achieves SOTA results on the pancreatic lesion dataset.