Lightweight medical image segmentation network with multi-scale feature-guided fusion

In the field of computer-aided medical diagnosis, it is crucial to adapt medical image segmentation to limited computing resources. There is tremendous value in developing accurate, real-time vision processing models that require minimal computational resources. When building lightweight models, there is always a trade-off between computational cost and segmentation performance. Performance often suffers when applying models to meet resource-constrained scenarios characterized by computation, memory, or storage constraints. This remains an ongoing challenge. This paper proposes a lightweight network for medical image segmentation. It introduces a lightweight transformer, proposes a simplified core feature extraction network to capture more semantic information, and builds a multi-scale feature interaction guidance framework. The fusion module embedded in this framework is designed to address spatial and channel complexities. Through the multi-scale feature interaction guidance framework and fusion module, the proposed network achieves robust semantic information extraction from low-resolution feature maps and rich spatial information retrieval from high-resolution feature maps while ensuring segmentation performance. This significantly reduces the parameter requirements for maintaining deep features within the network, resulting in faster inference and reduced floating-point operations (FLOPs) and parameter counts. Experimental results on ISIC2017 and ISIC2018 datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed network in medical image segmentation tasks. For instance, on the ISIC2017 dataset, the proposed network achieved a segmentation accuracy of 82.33 % mIoU, and a speed of 71.26 FPS on 256 × 256 images using a GeForce GTX 3090 GPU. Furthermore, the proposed network is tremendously lightweight, containing only 0.524M parameters. The corresponding source codes are available at https://github.com/CurbUni/LMIS-lightweight-network. •A novel lightweight backbone feature extraction network LBFE is proposed to capture more local features and details by grouping different feature maps, significantly reducing the parameters of the model while maintaining segmentation accuracy.•A multi-scale feature interaction guidance framework MFIG is proposed, which reduces computational complexity and allows the extraction of strong semantic information from low-resolution feature maps and rich spatial information from high-resolution feature maps through multi-directional n