Remote Diagnosis and Triaging Model for Skin Cancer Using EfficientNet and Extreme Gradient Boosting

Abstract

Due to the successful application of machine learning techniques in several fields, automated diagnosis system in healthcare has been increasing at a high rate. The aim of the study is to propose an automated skin cancer diagnosis and triaging model and to explore the impact of integrating the clinical features in the diagnosis and enhance the outcomes achieved by the literature study. We used an ensemble‐learning framework, consisting of the EfficientNetB3 deep learning model for skin lesion analysis and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) for clinical data. The study used PAD‐UFES‐20 data set consisting of six unbalanced categories of skin cancer. To overcome the data imbalance, we used data augmentation. Experiments were conducted using skin lesion merely and the combination of skin lesion and clinical data. We found that integration of clinical data with skin lesions enhances automated diagnosis accuracy. Moreover, the proposed model outperformed the results achieved by the previous study for the PAD‐UFES‐20 data set with an accuracy of 0.78, precision of 0.89, recall of 0.86, and F1 of 0.88. In conclusion, the study provides an improved automated diagnosis system to aid the healthcare professional and patients for skin cancer diagnosis and remote triaging.