Early Detection of Multiclass Skin Lesions Using Transfer Learning-Based IncepX-Ensemble Model

Abstract

Skin lesion diagnosis in medical image analysis is still a difficult task. A frequent kind of cancer known as skin cancer affects people worldwide and can be fatal. As a result, early and accurate diagnosis is crucial for finding skin cancer patients. One of the most recent technologies for detecting skin cancer is dermatoscopy. For proper treatment of skin cancer, an early diagnosis is required. The early stages of skin lesions are identical, making manual diagnosis difficult. Therefore, creating computer-aided methods for classifying skin lesions will assist dermatologists in detecting skin lesions earlier and treating them more successfully. Current research indicates a significant potential for the classification of skin lesions using deep learning networks. However, issues including unbalanced datasets, poor contrast lesions, and the extraction of pointless or duplicate features still need to be resolved. This study aims to propose a transfer learning-based ensemble model for more accurate classification results. InceptionV3 and Xception are employed to build an ensemble model for classifying skin lesion images known as IncepX-Ensemble. A traditional data augmentation method was employed for the HAM10000 dataset to address the imbalanced data. This technique mitigates the class imbalance by incorporating data augmentation, enhancing model accuracy. At the experiment’s outset, we utilized the original imbalanced data, and subsequently, balanced data were employed for the proposed model. Training and testing accuracy was achieved at 86% on the imbalanced dataset. A balanced data augmentation dataset yielded 98% training and 98% test accuracy rates. We evaluated the output of the proposed model against outputs from various transfer learning models using both the original and balanced datasets.

Keywords

• Deep learning
• skin lesion classification
• convolutional neural network
• transfer learning
• ensemble learning
• image classification