An Explainable Deep Learning Approach for Classifying Monkeypox Disease by Leveraging Skin Lesion Image Data

Abstract

According to the World Health Organization's (WHO) external situation report on the multi-country outbreak of Monkeypox in 2023, from 11 countries in Southeast Asia Regions, Thailand recorded the highest reported cases, totaling 461. The ongoing Monkeypox outbreak has raised significant public health concerns due to its rapid spread across several nations. Early detection and diagnosis are imperative for effectively treating and controlling Monkeypox. Given this context, this study aimed to determine the most efficient model for detecting Monkeypox by employing interpretable deep learning techniques. This study utilizes deep learning techniques to diagnose Monkeypox based on images of skin lesions. We evaluate based on four models—convolutional neural network (CNN), gated recurrent unit (GRU), long short-term memory (LSTM), and bidirectional long short term memory (BiLSTM)—using a publicly available dataset. Additionally, we incorporate Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) and techniques for explainable AI, facilitating visual interpretation of model predictions for healthcare practitioners. The CNN model's performance and LSTM model's performance have an accuracy of 100%, while the GRU model's performance and BiLSTM model's performance have an accuracy of 99.88% and 99.45%. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of deep learning models, including the suggested CNN model leveraging the pre-trained MobileNetV2 and LSTM. These models can play a pivotal role in combating the Monkeypox virus. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2024-08-05-013 Full Text: PDF

Keywords

• monkeypox
• skin lesion analysis
• convolutional neural network (cnn)
• gated recurrent unit (gru)
• long short term memory (lstm)
• bidirectional long short term memory (bilstm)
• deep learning
• explainable artificial intelligence.