Using Deep Learning Method for Classification: A Proposed Algorithm for the ISIC 2017 Skin Lesion Classification Challenge

Abstract: Skin cancer, the most common human malignancy, is primarily diagnosed visually by physicians [1]. Classification with an automated method like CNN [2, 3] shows potential for challenging tasks [1]. By now, the deep convolutional neural networks are on par with human dermatologist [1]. This abstract is dedicated on developing a Deep Learning method for ISIC [5] 2017 Skin Lesion Detection Competition hosted at [6] to classify the dermatology pictures, which is aimed at improving the diagnostic accuracy rate and general level of the human health. The challenge falls into three sub-challenges, including Lesion Segmentation, Lesion Dermoscopic Feature Extraction and Lesion Classification. This project only participates in the Lesion Classification part. This algorithm is comprised of three steps: (1) original images preprocessing, (2) modelling the processed images using CNN [2, 3] in Caffe [4] framework, (3) predicting the test images and calculating the scores that represent the likelihood of corresponding classification. The models are built on the source images are using the Caffe [4] framework. The scores in prediction step are obtained by two different models from the source images.