Deep Learning-Based Classification of Dermoscopic Images for Skin Lesions

The medical sciences are facing a major problem with the auto-detection of disease due to the fast growth in population density. Intelligent systems assist medical professionals in early disease detection and also help to provide consistent treatment that reduces the mortality rate. Skin cancer is considered to be the deadliest and most severe kind of cancer. Medical professionals utilize dermoscopy images to make a manual diagnosis of skin cancer. This method is labor-intensive and time-consuming and demands a considerable level of expertise. Automated detection methods are necessary for the early detection of skin cancer. The occurrence of hair and air bubbles in dermoscopic images affects the diagnosis of skin cancer. This research aims to classify eight different types of skin cancer, namely actinic keratosis (AKs), dermatofibroma (DFa), melanoma (MELa), basal cell carcinoma (BCCa), squamous cell carcinoma (SCCa), melanocytic nevus (MNi), vascular lesion (VASn), and benign keratosis (BKs). In this study, we propose SNC_Net, which integrates features derived from dermoscopic images through deep learning (DL) models and handcrafted (HC) feature extraction methods with the aim of improving the performance of the classifier. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is employed for classification. Dermoscopy images from the publicly accessible ISIC 2019 dataset for skin cancer detection is utilized to train and validate the model. The performance of the proposed model is compared with four baseline models, namely EfficientNetB0 (B1), MobileNetV2 (B2), DenseNet-121 (B3), and ResNet-101 (B4), and six state-of-the-art (SOTA) classifiers. With an accuracy of 97.81%, a precision of 98.31%, a recall of 97.89%, and an F1 score of 98.10%, the proposed model outperformed the SOTA classifiers as well as the four baseline models. Moreover, an Ablation study is also performed on the proposed method to validate its performance. The proposed method therefore assists dermatologists and other medical professionals in early skin cancer detection.

Skin-CAD: Explainable deep learning classification of skin cancer from dermoscopic images by feature selection of dual high-level CNNs features and transfer learning

Skin cancer is a common and deadly cancer. Dermoscopy is an effective tool for the observation of abnormal skin pigmentation. However, dermoscopy images are extremely complex and present great challenges for diagnosis. Therefore, we proposed a classification method based on the ensemble of individual advantage and group decision in dermoscopy images, including the ensemble strategy of group decision, the ensemble strategy of maximizing individual advantage, and the ensemble strategy of block-integrated voting. We used generative adversarial networks (GANs) to create a balanced sample space to better train convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Through transfer learning, the pre-training CNNs were used for fine-tuning, then the effects of different CNNs on the classification of different categories of dermoscopy images were compared, and the CNNs with better classification effect were selected for the ensemble of different strategies. This study is based on the ISIC 2018 dataset and ISIC 2019 dataset. Compared with the different individual CNNs and the frameworks, the proposed ensemble strategies achieve a better improvement in the evaluation criteria.

Skin cancer is among the most prevalent cancers in the USA, with millions of new cases reported each year. The two main types of skin cancer include aggressive, life-threatening melanoma and less lethal, though potentially very morbid if left unattended, non-melanoma types: basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma. The chief aim of this research project is to devise, curate, and propose a deep-learning CNN methodology for skin cancer detection in the USA. The dataset for the current research project was retrieved from the Kaggle website, particularly, The ISIC 2016 Skin Cancer Dataset contained dermoscopic images that were used for skin cancer classification. In this dataset, there were 1271 images of two classes of skin cancer, namely Malignant and Benign. These images were then gathered from the ISIC archive. The dataset was then divided into a training set consisting of 1022 images and a test set consisting of 249 images. The CNN proposed for this work is a deep-learning architecture designed to address skin cancer detection through dermoscopic images. The model follows a sequential architecture with multiple layers dedicated to the extraction of hierarchical features from input images. To assess the performance of the CNN algorithm for skin cancer detection, several proven metrics are utilized, namely, accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-Score. The model obtained a very high precision, recall, and F1-score over all classes, with a general accuracy of 94% for this multi-class problem. This model was very good, both in precision since it correctly identifies the actual positive cases and in recall, where it does not have false positives. The developed proposed CNN model for skin cancer detection has great potential to support human clinical decision-making in all dermatology. This developed model automates the various analyses of dermoscopy images, hence acting as just an adjunct tool for active dermatologists, which shall enable fast and accurate skin lesion assay. Results have shown that this CNN can easily be integrated into diagnosis workflows in normal dermatological practice to offer a second opinion or even a pre-screening tool for dermatologists.

Skin cancer is a class of disorder defined by the growth of abnormal cells on the body. Accurately identifying and diagnosing skin lesions is quite difficult because skin malignancies share many common characteristics and a wide range of morphologies. To face this challenge, deep learning algorithms have been proposed. Deep learning algorithms have shown diagnostic efficacy comparable to dermatologists in the discipline of images-based skin lesion diagnosis in recent research articles. This work proposes a novel deep learning algorithm to detect skin cancer. The proposed CAD-Skin system detects and classifies skin lesions using deep convolutional neural networks and autoencoders to improve the classification efficiency of skin cancer. The CAD-Skin system was designed and developed by the use of the modern preprocessing approach, which is a combination of multi-scale retinex, gamma correction, unsharp masking, and contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization. In this work, we have implemented a data augmentation strategy to deal with unbalanced datasets. This step improves the model's resilience to different pigmented skin conditions and avoids overfitting. Additionally, a Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) algorithm is integrated for final-stage classification. Our proposed CAD-Skin enhances category recognition for different skin disease severities, including actinic keratosis, malignant melanoma, and other skin cancers. The proposed system was tested using the PAD-UFES-20-Modified, ISIC-2018, and ISIC-2019 datasets. The system reached accuracy rates of 98%, 99%, and 99%, consecutively, which is higher than state-of-the-art work in the literature. The minimum accuracy achieved for certain skin disorder diseases reached 97.43%. Our research study demonstrates that the proposed CAD-Skin provides precise diagnosis and timely detection of skin abnormalities, diversifying options for doctors and enhancing patient satisfaction during medical practice.

Skin cancer is one of the most lethal types of cancer worldwide. There are different types of cancer but the most dangerous one is melanoma. In US alone, 1 out of 5 people will develop skin cancer by the age of 70 and more than 2 people die of skin cancer every hour. Taking these facts under consideration, early detection of skin cancer is crucial, and many lives could be saved. Deep learning technologies are proven to be of great aid in early detection. In this master thesis, different convolutional neural networks will be presented and tested on HAM10000 dataset of ISIC challenge dataset of 2018, containing 10.000 images of skin lesion from seven different classes. Neural networks will be trained on a portion of the dataset and then tested in new images. The convolutional networks used are Densenet201, Inception V3 and an Ensemble model of the previous two. Lastly, an application is developed which uses by default a convolutional network defined by the user. The user is able to feed an image in the application and a result out of the seven classes predefined will be presented.

Melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancers have shown a rapidly increasing incidence rate, pointing to skin cancer as a major problem for public health. When analyzing these lesions in dermoscopic images, the hairs and their shadows on the skin may occlude relevant information about the lesion at the time of diagnosis, reducing the ability of automated classification and diagnosis systems. In this work, we present a new approach for the task of hair removal on dermoscopic images based on deep learning techniques. Our proposed model relies on an encoder-decoder architecture, with convolutional neural networks, for the detection and posterior restoration of hair's pixels from the images. Moreover, we introduce a new combined loss function in the network's training phase that combines the L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> distance, the total variation loss, and a loss function based on the structural similarity index metric. Currently, there are no datasets that contain the same images with and without hair, which is necessary to quantitatively evaluate our model. Thus, we simulate the presence of hair in hairless images extracted from publicly known datasets. We compare our results with six state-of-the-art algorithms based on traditional computer vision techniques by means of similarity measures that compare the reference hairless image and the one with simulated hair. Finally, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test is used to compare the methods. The results, both qualitatively and quantitatively, demonstrate the effectiveness of our model and how our loss function improves the restoration ability of the proposed model.

e22018 Background: The prevalence of skin cancer is increasing worldwide. According to World Health Organization (WHO),there is one in every three cancers diagnosed in US is a skin cancer. Traditional ways for skin cancer diagnosis have shown many limitations: inadequate accuracy, consume much time, and effort. In order to assist dermatologists for earlier and accurate diagnosis, we propose to develop a computer aided diagnosis systems for automatic classification of skin lesions. Deep learning architectures are used in this area based on a new convolutional neural network that can classify skin lesions with improved accuracy. Methods: A public dataset of skin lesions HAM10000 ("Human Against Machine with 10000 training images") is used for training and testing. For the validation of our work, a private dataset is collected from a dermatology office in Besançon (France). This dataset contains 45 different dermatoscopic images of skin lesions (Basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma and Actinic keratosis) with their histology results. In this research, a three-phase approach was proposed and implemented: Phase one is preprocessing the data; by amputate missing values using the mean filling method. The dermoscopy images in the dataset were downscaled to 224X224 pixels. Then, data augmentation was applied to solve the imbalanced data problem. Finally, the ten-fold cross-validation method was applied to compare the performance of three CNN architectures used in literature: DenseNet 201, ResNet 152, and VGGNet with our proposed architecture. Results: Results obtained with our model show the highest classification accuracy 0.95, a sensitivity of 0, 96, a specificity of 0.94, and outperforms other algorithms in classifying these skin lesions. Conclusions: Our research improves the performance of computer aided diagnosis systems for skin lesions by giving an accurate classification. The use of this system helps dermatologists to make accurate classification with lower time, cost, and effort. Our future work will focus on generalizing the domain by developing a model that can classify various lesions using various types of data (dermoscopic images, histological images, clinical data, sensors data...etc) using the advanced techniques in literature of transfer learning and adaptors models.

Skin cancer ranks among the most commonly diagnosed forms of cancer worldwide, with millions of new cases identified annually. Over 2 million cases of non-melanoma skin cancer and approximately 132,000 melanoma cases are reported each year . The study aims is to develop an efficient deep learning model using CNN’s architectures to accurately classify skin lesions as malignant or benign based on dermoscopic images. This study explored the use of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models using AlexNet and ResNet architectures for skin cancer classification. The performance of both models were evaluated based on key metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. AlexNet was trained on 1,200 skin lesion images and validated on 600 images,training spanned 10 epochs. ResNet was similarly trained and validated after 10 epochs. Both architectures were compared under identical conditions (same dataset, pre-processing, optimizer, and hyperparameters). ResNet outperformed AlexNet in all performance metrics of accuracy as 91.00% and 59.00% respectively. This research explored the performance of CNN(ResNet50) and CNN(AlexNet). This validates that deeper architectures with residual connections, batch normalization, and optimized feature extraction are more effective for binary skin cancer classification.

Skin diseases are increasing and becoming a very serious problem. Skin cancer in general there are 2, namely melanoma and non-melanoma. Cases that are often encountered are in non-melanoma types. A critical factor in the treatment of skin cancer is early diagnosis. Doctors usually use the biopsy method to detect skin cancer. Computer-based technology provides convenient, cheaper, and faster diagnosis of skin cancer symptoms. This study aims to identify the type of skin cancer. The data used in the study were 6 types of skin cancer, namely Basal Cell Carcinoma, Dermatofibroma, Melanoma, Nevus image, Pigmented Benign Keratosis image, or Vascular Lesion, with a total of 60 dermoscopy images obtained from the Kaggle site. Dermoscopy image processing begins with a pre-processing process, which converts RGB images to LAB. After that, segmentation is carried out to separate objects from the background. The method of extracting shape and texture features is used to obtain the characteristics of dermoscopy images. As many as 2 types of shape features, namely eccentricity and metric, and 4 types of texture features, namely contrast, correlation, energy, and homogeneity. The result of this study is that it can identify the type of skin cancer based on image features that have been extracted using a program from the Matlab application. The technique of extracting shape and texture features is proven to work well in identifying the type of skin cancer. In the future it is expected to use more data, and add color features in identifying dermoscopy images.

Several countries, including the UK, have approved commercial artificial intelligence (AI) products as medical devices to assist in the diagnosis of skin cancer. However, lack of robust real-world data has led to professional bodies recommending against their use outside research environments. The aim of this study was to assess the performance of an internationally proven deep neural network as a screening tool in patients referred from primary care on the suspected skin cancer pathway. Dermoscopic images were obtained from patients attending a community lesion imaging clinic following referral from primary care on the suspected skin cancer pathway. Ultimate diagnosis was based on histology where available, face-to-face clinical opinion if no histology was obtained, and the opinion of two dermatology specialists with over 10 years’ experience for patients discharged directly from teletriage without histology or face-to-face review. Images were assessed by the neural network and binary categorization was performed. The algorithm was set to detect invasive malignancies and premalignant conditions (actinic keratosis, Bowen disease, keratoacanthoma) and was trained to dismiss benign naevi, benign keratotic lesions (seborrhoeic keratosis, lichen planus-like keratosis, solar lentigines), dermatofibromata and benign vascular lesions. In total, 333 of 382 lesions from consecutive patients who gave research consent were included. Reasons for exclusion were pen artefact on dermoscopic image (26), lesion resolved prior to imaging clinic (eight) inappropriate site (six), poor image quality (five) and other (four). Ultimate diagnoses were basal cell carcinoma (62), squamous cell carcinoma (19), melanoma (11), other malignancy (one), benign keratotic (80), actinic keratosis (61), Bowen disease (20), benign naevus (17), benign vascular (nine), keratoacanthoma (eight) and other benign (45). Overall, 81 of 333 lesions (24.3%) were classified by the algorithm as benign and 252 (75.7%) were flagged as possibly malignant or premalignant. Sensitivity for cancer was 100% (93 of 93 detected). Sensitivity for premalignant conditions was 97% (86 of 89 detected). Specificity for all patients was 51.7% (78 of 151 benign lesions correctly classified). Specificity when removing the ‘other benign’ category, which is in the algorithm’s exclusion criteria and not part of its training, was 65.1% (71 of 109 lesions accurately categorized). Two actinic keratoses and one cases of Bowen disease were incorrectly classified as benign. The algorithm performed extremely well on this real-life case series and detected 100% of invasive malignancies. AI screening of suspected skin cancer referrals is likely to play a significant part in addressing future National Health Service capacity–demand mismatch and would have reduced the caseload requiring specialist opinion by 24.3% in this series. There is urgent need in the UK for further transparent clinical trials and open competition between AI products on large real-world datasets. Further stratification of benign and premalignant conditions may lead to greater benefit than binary classification.

Man against machine reloaded: performance of a market-approved convolutional neural network in classifying a broad spectrum of skin lesions in comparison with 96 dermatologists working under less artificial conditions

Skin cancer is one of the critical diseases that occurs in different age groups of the population. Early detection and prevention can save many lives. Melanoma is one of the fundamental skin cancer types. The traditional approaches for skin lesion detection and classification (SLDC) failed to distinguish between melanoma and non-melanoma skin malignancies, resulting in low classification accuracy. Thus, this article is focused on the implementation of computer aided detection method for SLDC using iterative random forest (IRF) algorithm, hereafter named as IRFNet. The proposed IRFNet acts as a decision-making tool for the dermatologists. Initially, the first level consists of five intuitive classifiers (ICs) named as perceptron coupled with color local binary patterns (PC-CLBP), histograms of oriented gradients (HOGs), the generative adversarial network coupled with ABCD rule (GAN-ABCD), ResNet, and AlexNet are used to extract the texture, shape, color, size, and convolutional pixel connections-based features from given skin lesion images. Then, IRF algorithm is used to select the optimal features and finally the object classifier called deep learning convolutional neural network (DLCNN) is employed to classify the type of lesion as either melanoma or non-melanoma based on back-propagation perceptron that provides the final decision. The extensive simulation outcome performed on ISIC-2019 and PH2 datasets discloses the superiority of the proposed IRFNet in terms of precision, recall, sensitivity, specificity, and f1-score. In addition, it also achieved the trade-off between classification accuracy and execution time as compared to the existing SLDC approaches.

In recent years, computerized biomedical imaging and analysis have become extremely promising, more interesting, and highly beneficial. They provide remarkable information in the diagnoses of skin lesions. There have been developments in modern diagnostic systems that can help detect melanoma in its early stages to save the lives of many people. There is also a significant growth in the design of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems using advanced artificial intelligence. The purpose of the present research is to develop a system to diagnose skin cancer, one that will lead to a high level of detection of the skin cancer. The proposed system was developed using deep learning and traditional artificial intelligence machine learning algorithms. The dermoscopy images were collected from the PH2 and ISIC 2018 in order to examine the diagnose system. The developed system is divided into feature-based and deep leaning. The feature-based system was developed based on feature-extracting methods. In order to segment the lesion from dermoscopy images, the active contour method was proposed. These skin lesions were processed using hybrid feature extractions, namely, the Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) methods to extract the texture features. The obtained features were then processed using the artificial neural network (ANNs) algorithm. In the second system, the convolutional neural network (CNNs) algorithm was applied for the efficient classification of skin diseases; the CNNs were pretrained using large AlexNet and ResNet50 transfer learning models. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperformed the state-of-art methods for HP2 and ISIC 2018 datasets. Standard evaluation metrics like accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, precision, recall, and F-score were employed to evaluate the results of the two proposed systems. The ANN model achieved the highest accuracy for PH2 (97.50%) and ISIC 2018 (98.35%) compared with the CNN model. The evaluation and comparison, proposed systems for classification and detection of melanoma are presented.

BackgroundIn recent months, multiple publications have demonstrated the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN) to classify images of skin cancer as precisely as dermatologists. However, these CNNs failed to outperform the International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2016 challenge which ranked the average precision for classification of dermoscopic melanoma images. Accordingly, the technical progress represented by these studies is limited. In addition, the available reports are impossible to reproduce, due to incomplete descriptions of training procedures and the use of proprietary image databases or non-disclosure of used images. These factors prevent the comparison of various CNN classifiers in equal terms.ObjectiveTo demonstrate the training of an image-classifier CNN that outperforms the winner of the ISBI 2016 CNNs challenge by using open source images exclusively.MethodsA detailed description of the training procedure is reported while the used images and test sets are disclosed fully, to insure the reproducibility of our work.ResultsOur CNN classifier outperforms all recent attempts to classify the original ISBI 2016 challenge test data (full set of 379 test images), with an average precision of 0.709 (vs. 0.637 of the ISBI winner) and with an area under the receiver operating curve of 0.85.ConclusionThis work illustrates the potential for improving skin cancer classification with enhanced training procedures for CNNs, while avoiding the use of costly equipment or proprietary image data.