Deep learning based melanoma detection from dermoscopic images

Abstract

Melanoma which occurs with non-healing DNA degradation in melanocyte cells, is the most deadly type of skin cancers. Importantly, it can be identified for a treatment before it spreads to other tissues, i.e., early diagnosis. To identify, a specialist visually inspects whether the suspected lesion is melanoma or not. However, due to different education and experience levels of specialists or as a result of the patient not being in a facility that is specialized to this area, the problem of 'subjectivity' arises, and a good visual investigation accuracy may not always be achieved. Therefore, there is a significant need for automatic detection tools and systems. In this study, a method based on deep learning for automatic detection of melanoma from dermoscopic images is proposed. The developed system is tested with a large dataset and encouraging results are obtained. © 2019 IEEE.