Interaction-Oriented Feature Decomposition for Medical Image Lesion Detection

Common lesion detection networks typically use lesion features for classification and localization. However, many lesions are classified only by lesion features without considering the relation with global context features, which raises the misclassification problem. In this paper, we propose an Interaction-Oriented Feature Decomposition (IOFD) network to improve the detection performance on context-dependent lesions. Specifically, we decompose features output from a backbone into global context features and lesion features that are optimized independently. Then, we design two novel modules to improve the lesion classification accuracy. A Global Context Embedding (GCE) module is designed to extract global context features. A Global Context Cross Attention (GCCA) module without additional parameters is designed to model the interaction between global context features and lesion features. Besides, considering the different features required by classification and localization tasks, we further adopt a task decoupling strategy. IOFD is easy to train and end-to-end in terms of training and inference. The experimental results for datasets in two modalities outperform state-of-the-art algorithms, which demonstrates the effectiveness and generality of IOFD.