Hybrid Capsule Network Architecture Estimation for Melanoma Detection

As uncommon as its incidence is, melanoma is considered to be one of the most aggressive and deadly skin cancers today. Risk factors for the development of the disease are related to exposure to ultraviolet rays and family history. Currently, the diagnosis is made through dermatoscopy, a noninvasive technique that aims to observe the structures of the skin. The diagnosis of melanoma is linked to the professional's experience in identifying the disease. With the advancement of computing, solutions based on deep learning were suggested to help diagnose the disease. This work has as main objective the adaptation of a capsule neural network for the task of detecting melanoma in medical images. The proposed architecture consists of the VGG16 neural network combined with a capsule neural network. The results obtained by the proposed model fed with the ISIC Archive database proved to be promising when compared to the literature, obtaining an accuracy of 92.6, sensitivity of 90.9 and specificity of 92.8.