Exploring Genetic Programming Models in Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Skin Cancer Images

Extracting important information from complex skin lesion images is vital to effectively distinguish between different types of skin cancer images. In addition to providing high classification performance, such computer-aided diagnostic methods are needed where the models are interpretable and can provide knowledge about the discriminative features in skin lesion images. This underlying information can significantly assist dermatologists in identifying a particular stage or type of cancer. With its flexible representation and global search abilities, Genetic Programming (GP) is an ideal learning al-gorithm to evolve interpretable models and identify important features with significant information to discriminate between skin cancer classes. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of a recent GP-based feature learning method where different well-developed feature descriptors are integrated into the learning algorithms to extract high-level features for skin cancer image classification. The study explores the effectiveness of utilizing feature learning for this complex task and designing program structure to suit the problem domain as it has shown promising results compared to commonly used feature descriptors and an existing GP-based feature learning method developed for general image classification. This study analyzes the GP-evolved models to identify the prominent features and most effective feature descriptors important for the classification of these skin cancer images. The evolved models are interpretable, they provide knowledge that can assist dermatologists in making diagnoses in real-time clinical situations by identifying prominent skin cancer characteristics captured by the feature descriptors and learned during the evolutionary process.