LS-Net: lightweight segmentation network for dermatological epidermal segmentation in optical coherence tomography imaging.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) can be an important tool for non-invasive dermatological evaluation, providing useful data on epidermal integrity for diagnosing skin diseases. Despite its benefits, OCT's utility is limited by the challenges of accurate, fast epidermal segmentation due to the skin morphological diversity. To address this, we introduce a lightweight segmentation network (LS-Net), a novel deep learning model that combines the robust local feature extraction abilities of Convolution Neural Network and the long-term information processing capabilities of Vision Transformer. LS-Net has a depth-wise convolutional transformer for enhanced spatial contextualization and a squeeze-and-excitation block for feature recalibration, ensuring precise segmentation while maintaining computational efficiency. Our network outperforms existing methods, demonstrating high segmentation accuracy (mean Dice: 0.9624 and mean IoU: 0.9468) with significantly reduced computational demands (floating point operations: 1.131 G). We further validate LS-Net on our acquired dataset, showing its effectiveness in various skin sites (e.g., face, palm) under realistic clinical conditions. This model promises to enhance the diagnostic capabilities of OCT, making it a valuable tool for dermatological practice.