Analyzing Skin Lesions in Dermoscopy Images Using Convolutional Neural Networks

In this paper, we discuss the problem of automatic skin lesion analysis, specifically melanoma detection and semantic segmentation. We accomplish this by using deep learning techniques to perform classification on publicly available dermoscopic images. Skin cancer, of which melanoma is a type, is the most prevalent form of cancer in the US and more than four million cases are diagnosed in the US every year. In this work, we present our efforts towards an accessible, deep learning-based system that can be used for skin lesion classification, thus leading to an improved melanoma screening system. For classification, a deep convolutional neural network architecture is first implemented over the raw images. In addition, hand-coded features such as 166-D color histogram distribution, edge histogram and Multiscale Color local binary patterns are extracted from the images and presented to a random forest classifier. The average of the outputs from the two mentioned classifiers is taken as the final classification result. The classification task achieves an accuracy of 80.3%, AUC score of 0.69 and a precision score of 0.81. For segmentation, we implement a convolutional-deconvolutional architecture and the segmentation model achieves a Dice coefficient of 73.5%.