Skin cancer classifier based on convolution residual neural network

Abstract

Accurate automatic classification of skin lesion images is a great challenge as the image features are very close in these images. Convolution neural networks (CNN) promise to provide a potential classifier for skin lesions. This work will present dermatologist-level classification of skin cancer by using residual network (ResNet-50) as a deep learning convolutional neural network (DLCNN) that maps images to class labels. It presents a classifier with a single CNN to automatically recognize benign and malignant skin images. The network inputs are only disease labels and image pixels. About 320 clinical images of the different diseases have been used to train CNN. The model performance has been tested with untrained images from the two labels. This model identifies the most common skin cancers and can be updated with a new unlimited number of images. The DLCNN trained by the ResNet-50 model showed good classification of the benign and malignant skin categories. The ResNet-50 as a DLCNN has verified a significant recognition rate of more than 97% on the testing images, which proves that the benign and malignant lesion skin images are properly classified.