A smartphone-based application for an early skin disease prognosis: Towards a lean healthcare system via computer-based vision

Abstract

Malignancy is the tendency of a medical condition to progressively become fatal and generally refers to the presence of cancerous cells that can spread, invade, and destroy tissues. In the United States, a new cancer diagnosis is given every 30 s, and the rates of diagnosis are not indicating any slowdown. The number of cancer cases is projected to increase by 35% over the next decade. Increasing cancer cases have attracted researchers to find new approaches for their identification and characterization. Skin diseases are a significant healthcare burden, affecting millions of people globally. The early detection and diagnosis of skin diseases are essential to prevent adverse health consequences, including the development of malignant skin tumors. Dermoscopy-based diagnosis of skin diseases is a time-consuming process, particularly in resource-limited healthcare settings. Recent advancements in computer vision algorithms have led to the development of several smartphone-based applications for early skin disease prognosis. In this paper, we have utilized a set of 16 distinctive convolutional neural network models, based on deep learning, to process over 45,000 high-quality images from the HAM10000 dataset, encompassing seven categories of skin diseases. Our models were able to effectively identify and classify skin diseases using lesion images as input. Dermoscopy-based diagnosis of skin diseases is a time-consuming process, particularly in resource-limited healthcare settings. Our proposed application for early skin disease detection aims to prevent unintended health consequences, which can result in wastage of operating hours, resources, and, in some cases, compromised patient health. We have benchmarked our models against one another to evaluate their effectiveness and efficiency, using performance measures such as accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F-score, and G-Mean. Our results demonstrate that most deployed models achieve an accuracy of up to 99%.