Melanoma detection with a deep learning model

Skin cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer in the world and melanoma is the deadliest type of skin cancer. Both melanoma and melanocytic nevi begin in melanocytes (cells that produce melanin). However, melanocytic nevi are benign whereas melanoma is malignant. This work proposes a deep learning model for classification of these two lesions.   

In this analytic study, the database of HAM10000 (human against machine with 10000 training images) dermoscopy images, 1000 melanocytic nevi and 1000 melanoma images were employed, where in each category 900 images were selected randomly and were designated as the training set. The remaining 100 images in each category were considered as the test set. A deep learning convolutional neural network  (CNN) was deployed with AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al., 2012) as a pretrained model. The network was trained with 1800 dermoscope images and subsequently was validated with 200 test images. The proposed method removes the need for cumbersome tasks of lesion segmentation and feature extraction. Instead, the CNN can automatically learn and extract useful features from the raw images. Therefore, no image preprocessing is required. Study was conducted at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran from January to February, 2020.

The proposed model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve of 0.98. Using a confidence score threshold of 0.5, a classification accuracy of 93%, sensitivity of 94%, and specificity of 92% was attained. The user can adjust the threshold to change the model performance according to preference. For example, if sensitivity is the main concern; i.e. false negative is to be avoided, then the threshold must be reduced to improve sensitivity at the cost of specificity. The ROC curve shows that to achieve sensitivity of 100%, specificity is decreased to 83%.

The results show the strength of convolutional neural networks in melanoma detection in dermoscopy images. The proposed method can be deployed to help dermatologists in identifying melanoma. It can also be implemented for self diagnosis of photographs taken from skin lesions. This may facilitate early detection of melanoma, and hence substantially reduce the mortality chance of this dangerous malignancy.