MambaLiteUNet: Cross-Gated Adaptive Feature Fusion for Robust Skin Lesion Segmentation

TL;DR

MambaLiteUNet is a compact, efficient skin lesion segmentation model that integrates advanced modules for improved boundary delineation and texture recognition, outperforming state-of-the-art models on multiple benchmarks.

Contribution

The paper introduces MambaLiteUNet, a novel segmentation framework combining Mamba state space modeling with three modules for enhanced feature interaction and spatial detail preservation.

Findings

Achieves 87.12% IoU and 93.09% Dice on benchmarks, outperforming existing models.

Reduces parameters by 93.6% and GFLOPs by 97.6% compared to U-Net.

Performs best in domain generalization with 77.61% IoU and 87.23% Dice.

Abstract

Recent segmentation models have demonstrated promising efficiency by aggressively reducing parameter counts and computational complexity. However, these models often struggle to accurately delineate fine lesion boundaries and texture patterns essential for early skin cancer diagnosis and treatment planning. In this paper, we propose MambaLiteUNet, a compact yet robust segmentation framework that integrates Mamba state space modeling into a U-Net architecture, along with three key modules: Adaptive Multi-Branch Mamba Feature Fusion (AMF), Local-Global Feature Mixing (LGFM), and Cross-Gated Attention (CGA). These modules are designed to enhance local-global feature interaction, preserve spatial details, and improve the quality of skip connections. MambaLiteUNet achieves an average IoU of 87.12% and average Dice score of 93.09% across ISIC2017, ISIC2018, HAM10000, and PH2 benchmarks, outperforming state-of-the-art models. Compared to U-Net, our model improves average IoU and Dice by 7.72 and 4.61 points, respectively, while reducing parameters by 93.6% and GFLOPs by 97.6%. Additionally, in domain generalization with six unseen lesion categories, MambaLiteUNet achieves 77.61% IoU and 87.23% Dice, performing best among all evaluated models. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that MambaLiteUNet achieves a strong balance between accuracy and efficiency, making it a competitive and practical solution for dermatological image segmentation. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/maklachur/MambaLiteUNet.