Dermoscopy versus skin biopsy in diagnosis of suspicious skin lesions

DSCC_Net: Multi-Classification Deep Learning Models for Diagnosing of Skin Cancer Using Dermoscopic Images

Skin cancer is one of the most lethal kinds of human illness. In the present state of the health care system, skin cancer identification is a time-consuming procedure and if it is not diagnosed initially then it can be threatening to human life. To attain a high prospect of complete recovery, early detection of skin cancer is crucial. In the last several years, the application of deep learning (DL) algorithms for the detection of skin cancer has grown in popularity. Based on a DL model, this work intended to build a multi-classification technique for diagnosing skin cancers such as melanoma (MEL), basal cell carcinoma (BCC), squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), and melanocytic nevi (MN). In this paper, we have proposed a novel model, a deep learning-based skin cancer classification network (DSCC_Net) that is based on a convolutional neural network (CNN), and evaluated it on three publicly available benchmark datasets (i.e., ISIC 2020, HAM10000, and DermIS). For the skin cancer diagnosis, the classification performance of the proposed DSCC_Net model is compared with six baseline deep networks, including ResNet-152, Vgg-16, Vgg-19, Inception-V3, EfficientNet-B0, and MobileNet. In addition, we used SMOTE Tomek to handle the minority classes issue that exists in this dataset. The proposed DSCC_Net obtained a 99.43% AUC, along with a 94.17%, accuracy, a recall of 93.76%, a precision of 94.28%, and an F1-score of 93.93% in categorizing the four distinct types of skin cancer diseases. The rates of accuracy for ResNet-152, Vgg-19, MobileNet, Vgg-16, EfficientNet-B0, and Inception-V3 are 89.32%, 91.68%, 92.51%, 91.12%, 89.46% and 91.82%, respectively. The results showed that our proposed DSCC_Net model performs better as compared to baseline models, thus offering significant support to dermatologists and health experts to diagnose skin cancer.

Skin Cancer Disease Detection Using Transfer Learning Technique

Melanoma is a fatal type of skin cancer; the fury spread results in a high fatality rate when the malignancy is not treated at an initial stage. The patients’ lives can be saved by accurately detecting skin cancer at an initial stage. A quick and precise diagnosis might help increase the patient’s survival rate. It necessitates the development of a computer-assisted diagnostic support system. This research proposes a novel deep transfer learning model for melanoma classification using MobileNetV2. The MobileNetV2 is a deep convolutional neural network that classifies the sample skin lesions as malignant or benign. The performance of the proposed deep learning model is evaluated using the ISIC 2020 dataset. The dataset contains less than 2% malignant samples, raising the class imbalance. Various data augmentation techniques were applied to tackle the class imbalance issue and add diversity to the dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed deep learning technique outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning techniques in terms of accuracy and computational cost.

The effects of skin lesion segmentation on the performance of dermatoscopic image classification

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Malignant melanoma (MM) is one of the deadliest types of skin cancer. Analysing dermatoscopic images plays an important role in the early detection of MM and other pigmented skin lesions. Among different computer-based methods, deep learning-based approaches and in particular convolutional neural networks have shown excellent classification and segmentation performances for dermatoscopic skin lesion images. These models can be trained end-to-end without requiring any hand-crafted features. However, the effect of using lesion segmentation information on classification performance has remained an open question.

METHODS

In this study, we explicitly investigated the impact of using skin lesion segmentation masks on the performance of dermatoscopic image classification. To do this, first, we developed a baseline classifier as the reference model without using any segmentation masks. Then, we used either manually or automatically created segmentation masks in both training and test phases in different scenarios and investigated the classification performances. The different scenarios included approaches that exploited the segmentation masks either for cropping of skin lesion images or removing the surrounding background or using the segmentation masks as an additional input channel for model training.

RESULTS

Evaluated on the ISIC 2017 challenge dataset which contained two binary classification tasks (i.e. MM vs. all and seborrheic keratosis (SK) vs. all) and based on the derived area under the receiver operating characteristic curve scores, we observed four main outcomes. Our results show that 1) using segmentation masks did not significantly improve the MM classification performance in any scenario, 2) in one of the scenarios (using segmentation masks for dilated cropping), SK classification performance was significantly improved, 3) removing all background information by the segmentation masks significantly degraded the overall classification performance, and 4) in case of using the appropriate scenario (using segmentation for dilated cropping), there is no significant difference of using manually or automatically created segmentation masks.

CONCLUSIONS

We systematically explored the effects of using image segmentation on the performance of dermatoscopic skin lesion classification.