The recent emergence of deep learning methods for medical image analysis has enabled the development of intelligent medical imaging-based diagnosis systems that can assist the human expert in making better decisions about a patients health. In this paper we focus on the problem of skin lesion classification, particularly early melanoma detection, and present a deep-learning based approach to solve the problem of classifying a dermoscopic image containing a skin lesion as malignant or benign. The proposed solution is built around the VGGNet convolutional neural network architecture and uses the transfer learning paradigm. Experimental results are encouraging: on the ISIC Archive dataset, the proposed method achieves a sensitivity value of 78.66%, which is significantly higher than the current state of the art on that dataset.

Melanoma is a fatal form of skin cancer when left undiagnosed. Computer-aided diagnosis systems powered by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can improve diagnostic accuracy and save lives. CNNs have been successfully used in both skin lesion segmentation and classification. For reasons heretofore unclear, previous works have found image segmentation to be, conflictingly, both detrimental and beneficial to skin lesion classification. We investigate the effect of expanding the segmentation border to include pixels surrounding the target lesion. Ostensibly, segmenting a target skin lesion will remove inessential information, non-lesion skin, and artifacts to aid in classification. Our results indicate that segmentation border enlargement produces, to a certain degree, better results across all metrics of interest when using a convolutional based classifier built using the transfer learning paradigm. Consequently, preprocessing methods which produce borders larger than the actual lesion can potentially improve classifier performance, more than both perfect segmentation, using dermatologist created ground truth masks, and no segmentation altogether.