Analysis of skin lesion images with deep learning

Abstract

Skin cancer is the most common cancer worldwide, with melanoma being the deadliest form. Dermoscopy is a skin imaging modality that has shown an improvement in the diagnosis of skin cancer compared to visual examination without support. We evaluate the current state of the art in the classification of dermoscopic images based on the ISIC-2019 Challenge for the classification of skin lesions and current literature. Various deep neural network architectures pre-trained on the ImageNet data set are adapted to a combined training data set comprised of publicly available dermoscopic and clinical images of skin lesions using transfer learning and model fine-tuning. The performance and applicability of these models for the detection of eight classes of skin lesions are examined. Real-time data augmentation, which uses random rotation, translation, shear, and zoom within specified bounds is used to increase the number of available training samples. Model predictions are multiplied by inverse class frequencies and normalized to better approximate actual probability distributions. Overall prediction accuracy is further increased by using the arithmetic mean of the predictions of several independently trained models. The best single model has been published as a web service.