Non-dermatoscopic image analysis for the recognition of malignant skin diseases with convolutional neural network and autoencoders

Abstract

Every year, people around the world are affected by different skin diseases or cancer. Nowadays, these can only be detected accurately by clinical analysis and skin biopsy. However, the diagnosis of this malignant disease does not ensure the survival of the patient, since many clinical cases are detected in the terminal phases. Only early diagnosis would increase the life expectancy of patients. In this paper, we propose a method to recognition malignant skin diseases to identify malignant lesions in non-dermatoscopic images. For the method, we use Convolutional Neural Network and propose the use of autoencoders as another classification model that provides more information on the diagnosis. Experiments show that our proposal reaches up to 84.4% of accuracy in the well-known dataset of the ISIC-2016. In addition, we collect non-dermatoscopic images of skin lesions and developed a new dataset to demonstrate the advantage of our method.