Multiscale Feature Fusion for Skin Lesion Classification

Abstract

Skin cancer has a high mortality rate, and early detection can greatly reduce patient mortality. Convolutional neural network (CNN) has been widely applied in the field of computer-aided diagnosis. To improve the ability of convolutional neural networks to accurately classify skin lesions, we propose a multiscale feature fusion model for skin lesion classification. We use a two-stream network, which are a densely connected network (DenseNet-121) and improved visual geometry group network (VGG-16). In the feature fusion module, we construct multireceptive fields to obtain multiscale pathological information and use generalized mean pooling (GeM pooling) to reduce the spatial dimensionality of lesion features. Finally, we built and tested a system with the developed skin lesion classification model. The experiments were performed on the dataset ISIC2018, which can achieve a good classification performance with a test accuracy of 91.24% and macroaverages of 95%.