Melanoma skin cancer detection based on deep learning methods and binary Harris Hawk optimization

Abstract The issue of skin cancer has garnered significant attention from the scientific community worldwide, with melanoma being the most lethal and uncommon form of the disease. Melanoma occurs due to the uncontrolled growth of melanocyte cells, which are responsible for imparting color to the skin. If left untreated, melanoma can spread throughout the body and cause death. Early detection of melanoma can lower its mortality rate. In this study, we propose a robust Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based method for classifying melanoma images as healthy or non-healthy. To train and test the model, we utilized public datasets from International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC). Additionally, we compared our method with other classification techniques, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree, and K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN), using the Harris Hawks Optimization algorithm. The results of our method showed superior performance compared to the other approaches.