Skin Lesion Classification Using Convolutional Neural Network for Melanoma Recognition

Skin cancer, also known as melanoma, is generally diagnosed visually from the dermoscopic images, which is a tedious and time-consuming task for the dermatologist. Such a visual assessment, via the naked eye for skin cancers, is challenging and arduous due to different artifacts such as low contrast, various noise, presence of hair, fiber, and air bubbles, etc. This article proposes a robust and automatic framework for the Skin Lesion Classification (SLC), where we have integrated image augmentation, Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN), and transfer learning. The proposed framework was trained and tested on the publicly available IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI)-2017 dataset. The obtained average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), recall, precision, and F1-score are respectively 0.87, 0.73, 0.76, and 0.74 for the SLC. Our experimental studies for lesion classification demonstrate that the proposed approach can successfully distinguish skin cancer with a high degree of accuracy, which has the capability of skin lesion identification for melanoma recognition.