Federated Machine Learning for Detection of Skin Diseases and Enhancement of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) Security

Human skin disease, the most infectious dermatological ailment globally, is initially diagnosed by sight. Some clinical screening and dermoscopic analysis of skin biopsies and scrapings for accurate classification are medically compulsory. Classification of skin diseases using medical images is more challenging because of the complex formation and variant colors of the disease and data security concerns. Both the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) for classification and a federated learning approach for data privacy preservation show significant performance in the realm of medical imaging fields. In this paper, a custom image dataset was prepared with four classes of skin disease, a CNN model was suggested and compared with several benchmark CNN algorithms, and an experiment was carried out to ensure data privacy using a federated learning approach. An image augmentation strategy was followed to enlarge the dataset and make the model more general. The proposed model achieved a precision of 86%, 43%, and 60%, and a recall of 67%, 60%, and 60% for acne, eczema, and psoriasis. In the federated learning approach, after distributing the dataset among 1000, 1500, 2000, and 2500 clients, the model showed an average accuracy of 81.21%, 86.57%, 91.15%, and 94.15%. The CNN-based skin disease classification merged with the federated learning approach is a breathtaking concept to classify human skin diseases while ensuring data security.