Foundation-Model-Driven Skin Lesion Segmentation and Classification Using SAM-Adapters and Vision Transformers

Background: The precise segmentation and classification of dermoscopic images remain prominent obstacles in automated skin cancer evaluation due, in part, to variability in lesions, low-contrast borders, and additional artifacts in the background. There have been recent developments in foundation models, with a particular emphasis on the Segment Anything Model (SAM)—these models exhibit strong generalization potential but require domain-specific adaptation to function effectively in medical imaging. The advent of new architectures, particularly Vision Transformers (ViTs), expands the means of implementing robust lesion identification; however, their strengths are limited without spatial priors. Methods: The proposed study lays out an integrated foundation-model-based framework that utilizes SAM-Adapter-fine-tuning for lesion segmentation and a ViT-based classifier that incorporates lesion-specific cropping derived from segmentation and cross-attention fusion. The SAM encoder is kept frozen while lightweight adapters are fine-tuned only, to introduce skin surface-specific capacity. Segmentation priors are incorporated during the classification stage through fusion with patch-embeddings from the images, creating lesion-centric reasoning. The entire pipeline is trained using a joint multi-task approach using data from the ISIC 2018, HAM10000, and PH2 datasets. Results: From extensive experimentation, the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art segmentation and classification across the dataset. On the ISIC 2018 dataset, it achieves a Dice score of 94.27% for segmentation and an accuracy of 95.88% for classification performance. On PH2, a Dice score of 95.62% is achieved, and for HAM10000, an accuracy of 96.37% is achieved. Several ablation analyses confirm that both the SAM-Adapters and lesion-specific cropping and cross-attention fusion contribute substantially to performance. Paired t-tests are used to confirm statistical significance for all the previously stated measures where improvements over strong baselines indicate a p