Dermoscopic Image Classification Using Attention Mechanism and Ensemble Learning Approaches

Background and purpose: Skin tumours have become one of the most common diseases worldwide. While benign ones are not usually a threat to human health, malignant ones can develop into skin cancer and become life-threatening if left untreated. Early detection of the disease is important for the treatment of patients with skin tumours and dermoscopy is the most effective means of diagnosing skin tumours. However, the complexity of skin tumour cells makes the diagnosis somewhat erroneous for doctors. Therefore, a dermoscopic classification network based on deep learning and computer-aided diagnostic techniques is needed to obtain a high diagnostic accuracy rate for skin tumours. Methods: In this paper, Deep-skin, a model for dermoscopic image classification is proposed, which is based on both attention mechanism and ensemble learning. Considering the characteristics of dermoscopic images, embedding different attention mechanisms on top of Inception-V3 has been suggested to obtain more potential features. We then improve the classification performance by late fusion of the different models. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Deep-skin, experiments and evaluations are performed on the publicly available dataset Skin Cancer: Malignant vs. Benign and compare the performance of Deep-skin with other classification models. Results: The experimental results indicate that Deep-skin performs well on the dataset in comparison to other models, achieving a maximum accuracy of 87.8%.Conclusion: In this paper, the Deep-skin model is proposed for the classification of dermoscopic images and has shown better performance. In the future, we intend to investigate better classification models for automatic diagnosis of skin tumours. Such models can potentially assist physicians and patients in clinical settings.