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Multi-method fusion for image segmentation in skin disease analysis

Siqi Wang*, Danhong Li*, Yina Zhang*, Yu Wang, Linrong Yuan, Miao Yu, Jianghui Li, Yimeng Wang, Ping  Li


Faculty of Medical Instrumentation, Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Shanghai 201318, China.

*These authors are co-first authors. 


Address correspondence to: Ping Li, Faculty of Medical Instrumentation, Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences, 279 Zhouzhu Highway, Pudong New Area, Shanghai 201318, China. Tel: +86-13764055848. E-mail: lip@sumhs.edu.cn.


Declaration of ethics: The study was approved by the Ethics Review Committees of the Medical University of Vienna and the University of Queensland. 


Declaration of patient consent: The dataset underwent automated screening using neural networks, followed by multiple manual reviews. All EXIF metadata were removed to eliminate any potentially identifiable information. Therefore, the data are considered anonymized to the best of our knowledge.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.61189/446813bjkhvg

 

Received July 26, 2025; Accepted November 4, 2025; Published December 31, 2025


Highlights

● For the first time, the advantages of two deep learning architectures-SegNet and U-Net-were integrated by averaging their prediction outputs. This ensemble approach overcame the limitations of single models and substantially improved segmentation accuracy. 

● The proposed Ensemble Model outperformed both SegNet and U-Net across all major evaluation metrics, including the Intersection over Union (IoU, 93.73%), Dice coefficient (84.85%), precision (93.93%), and loss (0.63), confirming the effectiveness of multi-method fusion. 

● Considering the complex morphology and indistinct lesion boundaries characteristic of skin diseases, a standardized preprocessing and data augmentation pipeline was developed to enhance the model' s robustness in handling diverse lesion patterns.

Abstract

Objective: The morphological complexity of dermatologic diseases poses considerable challenges to clinical diagnosis. Conventional manual interpretation of skin images is time-consuming and influenced by subjective variability, which limits diagnostic accuracy. Hence, developing advanced medical image segmentation techniques through multi-method fusion is of particular importance. Methods: A comprehensive dataset of dermatologic images was utilized and rigorously preprocessed to ensure reliability and consistency. Two representative deep learning models, SegNet and U-Net, were optimized to achieve precise delineation of lesion areas. Building upon their complementary strengths, a novel fusion-based image segmentation framework was proposed, integrating both models to enhance performance through synergistic learning. The effectiveness of the ensemble strategy was validated through extensive experiments using standard evaluation metrics, including the Dice coefficient and Intersection over Union. Results: Compared with each individual model, the Ensemble Model yielded consistent improvements across all evaluation indices, with a notable reduction in loss values. These enhancements indicate markedly better learning efficiency and generalization in dermatologic image segmentation tasks. Conclusion: By integrating multiple deep learning algorithms, this fusion technique solves the misclassification and omission issues observed in single-model segmentation. It significantly improves overall segmentation accuracy and demonstrates superior performance, particularly in edge detection of complex skin lesions.

Keywords: Skin cancer, deep learning, image segmentation, multi-method fusion

Cite

Wang SQ, Li DH, Zhang YA, Wang Y, Yuan LR, Yu M, Li JH, Wang YM, Li P. Multi-method fusion for image segmentation in skin disease analysis. Prog in Med Devices. 2025 Dec; 3 (4): 223-233. doi: 10.61189/446813bjkhvg

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