Automatic Diagnosis of Melanoma Based on EfficientNet and Patch Strategy

Abstract

Abstract Melanoma is a fatal skin disease, and there are many challenging tasks in the detection of melanoma through neural network at this stage. We propose a new method for melanoma diagnosis based on EfficientNet and patch strategy. The diagnosis method has three stages of operation. First, Cyclegan is applied offline to synthesize the under-represented category samples from the over-represented category samples, and the original image and the synthesized samples are combined into a new training set to complete the conditional image synthesis task; second, we creatively propose the patch strategy and implement the patch algorithm, and apply the patch strategy offline to obtain the patch image of the newly merged training set; finally, the newly merged training set and the obtained patch image are sent to the classification network. Where, the model we proposed is composed of three parts: Basic Convolutional Neural Network, Auxiliary Convolutional Neural Network, and Fusion Convolutional Neural Network, and applies a weighted integration strategy. We evaluated the proposed method on the ISIC 2016 Skin Injury Challenge classification dataset. Experiments show that the patch strategy plays an important role in the field of melanoma classification, and the melanoma detection method proposed in this paper obtains an accuracy of 0.852 and an AUC value of 0.854 on the test set. This method can focus the attention of the classification network on the meaningful area of the skin lesion image through manual intervention, and can effectively solve the problem of category imbalance, thereby improving the performance of skin lesion classification.

Keywords

• Conditional image synthesis
• Melanoma
• Patch strategy
• Fusion strategy