Skin cancer, particularly melanoma, is one of the most fatal forms of cancer worldwide, necessitating early detection for effective treatment. The HAM10000 dataset is used as a standard for skin lesion analysis in this study to use a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to sort seven different types of skin cancer into groups. The dataset consists of over 10,000 labeled dermoscopic images representing various classes such as melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, and benign keratosis. The methodology includes preprocessing techniques like resizing, normalization, and augmentation to enhance the diversity of the data and address class imbalance. The Adam optimizer, with a learning rate of 0.0001, trained a custom CNN model with multiple convolutional layers, batch normalization, and ReLU activations. The model’s performance was evaluated across training, validation, and testing subsets, achieving a training accuracy of 98.17% and a validation accuracy of 99.60% after 10 epochs. Evaluation tools, such as a classification report and a confusion matrix, showed high accuracy for common classes like melanocytic nevi but showed mistakes in underrepresented classes like vascular lesions and dermatofibroma. Compared with state-of-the-art techniques like ResNet and EfficientNet, the proposed model demonstrates competitive performance with fewer computational resources. The study emphasizes the potential of deep learning in automating skin cancer detection while identifying challenges like class imbalance and the need for improved generalization. The results show how important advanced augmentation techniques, transfer learning, and ensemble approaches are for making models work better. This research contributes to the ongoing development of reliable, automated diagnostic tools, aiming to improve clinical outcomes and assist dermatologists in accurate and efficient skin cancer diagnosis.
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