Deep Learning-Based Classification for Melanoma Detection Using XceptionNet

Abstract

Skin cancer is one of the most common types of cancer in the world, accounting for at least 40% of all cancers. Melanoma is considered as the 19th most commonly occurring cancer among the other cancers in the human society, such that about 300,000 new cases were found in 2018. While cancer diagnosis is based on interventional methods such as surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy, studies show that the use of new computer technologies such as image processing mechanisms in processes related to early diagnosis of this cancer can help the physicians heal this cancer. This paper proposes an automatic method for diagnosis of skin cancer from dermoscopy images. The proposed model is based on an improved XceptionNet, which utilized swish activation function and depthwise separable convolutions. This system shows an improvement in the classification accuracy of the network compared to the original Xception and other dome architectures. Simulations of the proposed method are compared with some other related skin cancer diagnosis state-of-the-art solutions, and the results show that the suggested method achieves higher accuracy compared to the other comparative methods.