Modified EfficientNet-B0 Architecture Optimized with Quantum-Behaved Algorithm for Skin Cancer Lesion Assessment

<b>Background/Objectives</b>: Skin cancer is one of the most common diseases in the world, whose early and accurate detection can have a survival rate more than 90% while the chance of mortality is almost 80% in case of late diagnostics. <b>Methods</b>: A modified EfficientNet-B0 is developed based on mobile inverted bottleneck convolution with squeeze and excitation approach. The 3 × 3 convolutional layer is used to capture low-level visual features while the core features are extracted using a sequence of Mobile Inverted Bottleneck Convolution blocks having both 3 × 3 and 5 × 5 kernels. They not only balance fine-grained extraction with broader contextual representation but also increase the network's learning capacity while maintaining computational cost. The proposed architecture hyperparameters and extracted feature vectors of standard benchmark datasets (HAM10000, ISIC 2019 and MSLD v2.0) of dermoscopic images are optimized with the quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization algorithm (QBPSO). The merit function is formulated by the training loss given in the form of standard classification cross-entropy with label smoothing, mean fitness value (mf^val), average accuracy (mAcc), mean computational time (mCT) and other standard performance indicators. <b>Results</b>: Comprehensive scenario-based simulations were performed using the proposed framework on a publicly available dataset and found an mAcc of 99.62% and 92.5%, mfval of 2.912 × 10^-10 and 1.7921 × 10^-8, mCT of 501.431 s and 752.421 s for HAM10000 and ISIC2019 datasets, respectively. The results are compared with state of the art, pre-trained existing models like EfficentNet-B4, RegNetY-320, ResNetXt-101, EfficentNetV2-M, VGG-16, Deep Lab V3 as well as reported techniques based on Mask RCCN, Deep Belief Net, Ensemble CNN, SCDNet and FixMatch-LS techniques having varying accuracies from 85% to 94.8%. The reliability of the proposed architecture and stability of QBPSO is examined through Monte Carlo simulation of 100 independent runs and their statistical soundings. <b>Conclusions</b>: The proposed framework reduces diagnostic errors and assists dermatologists in clinical decisions for an improved patient outcomes despite the challenges like data imbalance and interpretability.