Accurate skin cancer diagnosis based on convolutional neural networks

Abstract

Although melanoma is not the most common type of skin cancer, it is supposed to extend to other areas of the body if not early diagnosed. Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer and accounts for about 75% of deaths associated with skin cancer. The present study introduces an automated technique for skin cancer prediction, detection, and diagnosis including trending noninvasive and nonionizing techniques that combines deep learning methods to diagnose melanoma with high accuracy. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) using medical images is utilized to distinguish benign and malignant tumors, which can assist physicians in early identification of symptoms, thus lowering the mortality rate. The CAD system consists of four phases; detection of the region of interest (RoI), using data augmentation techniques, processing RoI using convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract the most important features, and finally the extracted CNN features are input to a support vector machine (SVM) classifier to decode the two classes benign (B) and malignant (M). Two datasets, ISIC and CPTAC-CM, were utilized to train the CNNs. GoogleNet, ResNet-50, AlexNet, and VGG19 were investigated and compared. The accuracy of the proposed CAD system has reached 99.8% for ISIC database and 99.9% for CPTAC-CM database.