AMFF-Net: An Adaptive Multi-Layer Feature Fusion Network Based on ConvNeXtV2-B for Medical Image Classification

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Although ConvNeXtV2 has shown promising performance in medical image classification, approaches relying primarily on final-stage features may underutilize low-level structural and complementary hierarchical information. To address this limitation, we propose an Adaptive Multi-Layer Feature Fusion Network (AMFF-Net) based on ConvNeXtV2-B for medical image classification. The proposed framework employs a Feature Alignment (FA) module to project multi-stage features into a unified representation space and an Adaptive Multi-Layer Feature Fusion (AMFF) module to compute a single input-dependent scalar weight for each stage and dynamically adjust the relative contributions of hierarchical features. An Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) module is subsequently incorporated to enhance the fused representation through lightweight channel-wise recalibration. AMFF-Net was evaluated on three medical image classification datasets: Kvasir-v2, HAM10000, and ChestXray14. Experimental results demonstrate that AMFF-Net consistently improves classification performance over the baseline ConvNeXtV2-B and achieves competitive performance compared with representative convolutional neural network (CNN)- and Transformer-based architectures, while incurring relatively modest additional computational overhead. Ablation results further support the contribution of FA, AMFF, and ECA to the overall performance of the proposed framework.