A Deep Learning-Based Transfer Learning Framework for the Early Detection and Classification of Dermoscopic Images of Melanoma

Abstract

Purpose:Less contrast between lesions and skin, blurriness, darkened lesion images, presence of bubbles, hairs are the artifactsmakes the issue challenging in timely and accurate diagnosis of melanoma. In addition, huge similarity amid nevus lesions and melanoma pose complexity in investigating the melanoma even for the expert dermatologists. Method: In this work, a computer-aided diagnosis for melanoma detection (CAD-MD) system is designed and evaluated for the early and accurate detection of melanoma using thepotentials of machine, and deep learning-based transfer learning for the classification of pigmented skin lesions. The designed CAD-MD comprises of preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction and classification. Experiments are conducted on dermoscopic images of PH2 and ISIC 2016 publicly available datasets using machine learning and deep learning-based transfer leaning models in twofold: first, with actual images, second, with augmented images. Results:Optimal results are obtained on augmented lesion images using machine learning and deep learning models on PH2 and ISIC-16 dataset. The performance of the CAD-MD system is evaluated using accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, dice coefficient, and jacquard Index. Conclusion:Empirical results show that using the potentials of deep learning-based transfer learning model VGG-16 has significantly outperformed all employed models with an accuracy of 99.1% on the PH2 dataset.