Transforming Skin Cancer Diagnosis: A Deep Learning Approach with the Ham10000 Dataset

Skin cancer (SC) is one of the three most common cancers worldwide. Melanoma has the deadliest potential to spread to other parts of the body among all SCs. For SC treatments to be effective, early detection is essential. The high degree of similarity between tumor and non-tumors makes SC diagnosis difficult even for experienced doctors. To address this issue, authors have developed a novel Deep Learning (DL) system capable of automatically classifying skin lesions into seven groups: actinic keratosis (AKIEC), melanoma (MEL), benign keratosis (BKL), melanocytic Nevi (NV), basal cell carcinoma (BCC), dermatofibroma (DF), and vascular (VASC) skin lesions. Authors introduced the Multi-Grained Enhanced Deep Cascaded Forest (Mg-EDCF) as a novel DL model. In this model, first, researchers utilized subsampled multigrained scanning (Mg-sc) to acquire micro features. Second, authors employed two types of Random Forest (RF) to create input features. Finally, the Enhanced Deep Cascaded Forest (EDCF) was utilized for classification. The HAM10000 dataset was used for implementing, training, and evaluating the proposed and Transfer Learning (TL) models such as ResNet, AlexNet, and VGG16. During the validation and training stages, the performance of the four networks was evaluated by comparing their accuracy and loss. The proposed method outperformed the competing models with an average accuracy score of 98.19%. Our proposed methodology was validated against existing state-of-the-art algorithms from recent publications, resulting in consistently greater accuracies than those of the classifiers.