A comprehensive analysis of deep learning and transfer learning techniques for skin cancer classification

Accurately and early diagnosis of melanoma is one of the challenging tasks due to its unique characteristics and different shapes of skin lesions. So, in order to solve this issue, the current study examines various deep learning-based approaches and provide an effective approach for classifying dermoscopic images into two categories of skin lesions. This research focus on skin cancer images and provides solution using deep learning approaches. This research investigates three approaches for classifying skin cancer images. (1) Utilizing three fine-tuned pre-trained networks (VGG19, ResNet18, and MobileNet_V2) as classifiers. (2) Employing three pre-trained networks (ResNet-18, VGG19, and MobileNet v2) as feature extractors in conjunction with four machine learning classifiers (SVM, DT, Naïve Bayes, and KNN). (3) Utilizing a combination of the aforementioned pre-trained networks as feature extractors in conjunction with same machine learning classifiers. All these algorithms are trained using segmented images which are achieved by using the active contour approach. Prior to segmentation, preprocessing step is performed which involves scaling, denoising, and enhancing the image. Experimental performance is measured on the ISIC 2018 dataset which contains 3300 images of skin disease including benign and malignant type cancer images. 80% of the images from the ISIC 2018 dataset are allocated for training, while the remaining 20% are designated for testing. All approaches are trained using different parameters like epoch, batch size, and learning rate. The results indicate that combining ResNet-18 and MobileNet pre-trained networks using concatenation with an SVM classifier achieved the maximum accuracy of 92.87%.