DARNet: A Dual Attention Residual Network for Medical Image Classification

In the field of medical image analysis, accurate classification of images is crucial for diagnosing diseases and formulating treatment plans. Many studies have shown that global features and local features help reduce noise interference in medical images. Due to the fixed receptive field size of the convolution kernel, it is difficult to capture the global features of the image. Although the self-attention-based Transformer can model long-range dependencies, it has high computational complexity and lacks local inductive bias. This paper proposes a new module based on dual attention, the Dual Attention Residual Module(DARNet), which uses multi-head self-attention (MHSA) to enhance the global feature extraction ability of convolutional neural network (CNN), while the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) enhances local feature extraction, and then fuses features at different levels through dual-step attention fusion (DSAF). Then we use the architecture of resnet to build the network-Dual Attention Residual Network (DARNet). We evaluate our network on the ISIC2018 and Kvasir datasets and demonstrate its superior performance compared with state-of-the-art models