Skin Lesions Classification Using Deep Learning Based on Dilated Convolution

The prediction of skin lesions is a challenging task even for experienced dermatologists due to a little contrast between surrounding skin and lesions, the visual resemblance between skin lesions, fuddled lesion border, etc. An automated computer-aided detection system with given images can help clinicians to prognosis malignant skin lesions at the earliest time. Recent progress in deep learning includes dilated convolution known to have improved accuracy with the same amount of computational complexities compared to traditional CNN. To implement dilated convolution, we choose the transfer learning with four popular architectures: VGG16, VGG19, MobileNet, and InceptionV3. The HAM10000 dataset was utilized for training, validating, and testing, which contains a total of 10015 dermoscopic images of seven skin lesion classes with huge class imbalances. The top-1 accuracy achieved on dilated versions of VGG16, VGG19, MobileNet, and InceptionV3 is 87.42%, 85.02%, 88.22%, and 89.81%, respectively. Dilated InceptionV3 exhibited the highest classification accuracy, recall, precision, and f-1 score and dilated MobileNet also has high classification accuracy while having the lightest computational complexities. Dilated InceptionV3 achieved better overall and per-class accuracy than any known methods on skin lesions classification to the best of our knowledge while experimenting with a complex open-source dataset with class imbalances.