Deep Learning-Based System for Automatic Melanoma Detection

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer. Distinguishing melanoma lesions from non-melanoma lesions has however been a challenging task. Many Computer Aided Diagnosis and Detection Systems have been developed in the past for this task. They have been limited in performance due to the complex visual characteristics of the skin lesion images which consists of inhomogeneous features and fuzzy boundaries. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based method that overcomes these limitations for automatic melanoma lesion detection and segmentation. An enhanced encoder-decoder network with encoder and decoder sub-networks connected through a series of skip pathways which brings the semantic level of the encoder feature maps closer to that of the decoder feature maps is proposed for efficient learning and feature extraction. The system employs multi-stage and multi-scale approach and utilizes softmax classifier for pixel-wise classification of melanoma lesions. We devise a new method called Lesion-classifier that performs the classification of skin lesions into melanoma and non-melanoma based on results derived from pixel-wise classification. Our experiments on two well-established public benchmark skin lesion datasets, International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging(ISBI)2017 and Hospital Pedro Hispano (PH2), demonstrate that our method is more effective than some state-of-the-art methods. We achieved accuracy and dice coefficient of 95% and 92% on ISIC 2017 dataset and accuracy and dice coefficient of 95% and 93% on PH2 datasets.