Yu, Pengyang, Wang, Haoquan, Marks, Gerard, Kechadi, Tahar, Yang, Laurence T., Dhelim, Sahraoui
ORCID: 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 |
Documents
Full text available as:
Preview |
PDF
- Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader
Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 5MB |
Metrics
Altmetric Badge
Dimensions Badge
Downloads
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year
Archive Staff Only: edit this record