Atrous Convolution with Transfer Learning for Skin Lesions Classification

Skin cancer is a crucial public health issue and by far the most usual kind of cancer specifically in the region of North America. It is estimated that in 2019, only because of melanoma nearly 7,230 people will die, and 192,310 cases of malignant melanoma will be diagnosed. Nonetheless, nearly all types of skin lesions can be treatable if they can be diagnosed at an earlier stage. The accurate prediction of skin lesions is a critically challenging task even for vastly experienced clinicians and dermatologist due to a little distinction between surrounding skin and lesions, visual resemblance between melanoma and other skin lesions, fuddled lesion border, etc. A well-grounded automated computer-aided skin lesions detection system can help clinicians immensely to prognosis malignant skin lesion in the earliest possible time. From the past few years, the emergence of machine learning and deep learning in the medical imaging has produced several image-based classification systems in the medical field and these systems perform better than traditional image processing classification methods. In this paper, we proposed a popular deep learning technique namely atrous or, dilated convolution for skin lesions classification, which is known to have enhanced accuracy with the same amount of computational cost compared to traditional CNN. To implement atrous convolution we choose the transfer learning technique with several popular deep learning architectures such as VGG16, VGG19, MobileNet, and InceptionV3. To train, validate, and test our proposed models we utilize HAM10000 dataset which contains total 10015 dermoscopic images of seven different skin lesions (melanoma, melanocytic nevi, Basal cell carcinoma, Benign keratosis-like lesions, Dermatofibroma, Vascular lesions, and Actinic keratoses). Four of our proposed dilated convolutional frameworks show promising outcome on overall accuracy and per-class accuracy. For example, overall test accuracy achieved 87.42%, 85.02%, 88.22%, and 89.81% on dilated VGG16, dilated VGG19, dilated MobileNet, and dilated IncaptionV3 respectively. These dilated convolutional models outperformed existing networks in both overall accuracy and individual class accuracy. Among all the architectures dilated InceptionV3 shows superior classification accuracy and dilated MobileNet is also achieving almost impressive classification accuracy like dilated InceptionV3 with the lightest computational complexities than all other proposed model. Compared to previous works done on skin lesions classification we have experimented one of the most complicated open-source datasets with class imbalances and achieved better accuracy (dilated inceptionv3) than any known methods to the best of our knowledge.