A multi-class skin Cancer classification using deep convolutional neural networks

Abstract

Skin Cancer accounts for one-third of all diagnosed cancers worldwide. The prevalence of skin cancers have been rising over the past decades. In recent years, use of dermoscopy has enhanced the diagnostic capability of skin cancer. The accurate diagnosis of skin cancer is challenging for dermatologists as multiple skin cancer types may appear similar in appearance. The dermatologists have an average accuracy of 62% to 80% in skin cancer diagnosis. The research community has been made significant progress in developing automated tools to assist dermatologists in decision making. In this work, we propose an automated computer-aided diagnosis system for multi-class skin (MCS) cancer classification with an exceptionally high accuracy. The proposed method outperformed both expert dermatologists and contemporary deep learning methods for MCS cancer classification. We performed fine-tuning over seven classes of HAM10000 dataset and conducted a comparative study to analyse the performance of five pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and four ensemble models. The maximum accuracy of 93.20% for individual model amongst the set of models whereas maximum accuracy of 92.83% for ensemble model is reported in this paper. We propose use of ResNeXt101 for the MCS cancer classification owing to its optimized architecture and ability to gain higher accuracy.