Six skin diseases classification using deep convolutional neural network

Abstract

Smart imaging-based medical classification systems help the human diagnose the diseases and make better decisions about patient health. Recently, computer-aided classification of skin diseases has been a popular research area due to its importance in the early detection of skin diseases. This paper presents at its core, a system that exploits convolutional neural networks to classify color images of skin lesions. It relies on a pre-trained deep convolutional neural network to classify between six skin diseases: acne, athlete's foot, chickenpox, eczema, skin cancer, and vitiligo. Additionally, we constructed a dataset of 3000 colored images from several online datasets and the Internet. Experimental results are encouraging, where the proposed model achieved an accuracy of 81.75%, which is higher than the state of the art researches in this field. This accuracy was calculated using the holdout method, where 90% of the images were used for training, and 10% of the images were used for out-of-sample accuracy testing.