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MedLiteNet: Lightweight Hybrid Medical Image Segmentation Model for the Medical Internet of Things (MIoT)

Yu, Pengyang, Wang, Haoquan, Marks, Gerard, Kechadi, Tahar, Yang, Laurence T., Dhelim, Sahraoui orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-3620-1395 and Aung, Nyothiri (2026) MedLiteNet: Lightweight Hybrid Medical Image Segmentation Model for the Medical Internet of Things (MIoT). IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Sensors, 3 . pp. 78-89. ISSN 2836-2071 (In Press)

Abstract
Accurate skin-lesion segmentation remains a key technical challenge for computer-aided diagnosis of skin cancer. Convolutional neural networks, while effective, are constrained by limited receptive fields and thus struggle to model long-range dependencies. Vision Transformers capture global context, yet their quadratic complexity and large parameter budgets hinder use on the small-sample medical datasets common in dermatology. We introduce the MedLiteNet, a lightweight CNN– Transformer hybrid tailored for dermoscopic segmentation that achieves high precision through hierarchical feature extraction and multiscale context aggregation. The encoder stacks depthwise mobile inverted bottleneck blocks to curb computation, inserts a bottleneck-level cross-scale token-mixing unit to exchange information between resolutions, and embeds a boundary-aware self-attention module to sharpen lesion contours. On the ISIC 2018 benchmark, a single MedLiteNet model attains a Dice score of 0.897 ± 0.010 and an IoU of 0.821 ± 0.015 with fewer than 3.3 M parameters. A performance-weighted ensemble of three complementary variants raises accuracy to 0.904 ± 0.012 Dice and 0.830 ± 0.018 IoU while keeping the total parameter count below 10 M—over 90% smaller than Vision-Transformer backbones. Qualitative results confirm superiority on irregular borders, low-contrast regions and multiscale lesions, indicating MedLiteNet’s suitability for real-time, resource-aware computer-aided dermatology.
Metadata
Item Type:Article (In Press)
Refereed:Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:Image segmentation;Transformers;Lesions;Feature extraction;Accuracy;Skin;Convolution;Computational modeling;Computer architecture;Decoding;Attention mechanism;boundary detection;convolutional neural network;lightweight model;medical image segmentation;skin lesions;transformer
Subjects:Computer Science > Artificial intelligence
Computer Science > Image processing
Computer Science > Machine learning
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing
DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Publisher:Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Official URL:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumb...
Copyright Information:Authors
ID Code:32441
Deposited On:20 Mar 2026 14:52 by Sahraoui Dhelim . Last Modified 20 Mar 2026 14:52
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