Skin Cancer Detection Based on Deep Learning

The conventional procedure of skin-related disease detection is a visual inspection by a dermatologist or a primary care clinician, using a dermatoscope. The suspected patients with early signs of skin cancer are referred for biopsy and histopathological examination to ensure the correct diagnosis and the best treatment. Recent advancements in deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved excellent performance in automated skin cancer classification with accuracy similar to that of dermatologists. However, such improvements are yet to bring about a clinically trusted and popular system for skin cancer detection.  This study aimed to propose viable deep learning (DL) based method for the detection of skin cancer in lesion images, to help physicians in diagnosis. In this analytical study, a novel DL based model was proposed, in which other than the lesion image, the patient’s data, including the anatomical site of the lesion, age, and gender were used as the model input to predict the type of the lesion. An Inception-ResNet-v2 CNN pretrained for object recognition was employed in the proposed model.  Based on the results, the proposed method achieved promising performance for various skin conditions, and also using the patient’s metadata in addition to the lesion image for classification improved the classification accuracy by at least 5% in all cases investigated. On a dataset of 57536 dermoscopic images, the proposed approach achieved an accuracy of 89.3%±1.1% in the discrimination of 4 major skin conditions and 94.5%±0.9% in the classification of benign vs. malignant lesions.   The promising results highlight the efficacy of the proposed approach and indicate that the inclusion of the patient’s metadata with the lesion image can enhance the skin cancer detection performance.