Skin Lesion Analysis Towards Melanoma Detection Using Deep Learning Network

Skin lesion is a severe disease in world-wide extent. Early detection of melanoma in dermoscopy images significantly increases the survival rate. However, the accurate recognition of melanoma is extremely challenging due to the following reasons, e.g. low contrast between lesions and skin, visual similarity between melanoma and non-melanoma lesions, etc. Hence, reliable automatic detection of skin tumors is very useful to increase the accuracy and efficiency of pathologists. International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) is a challenge focusing on the automatic analysis of skin lesion. In this paper, we proposed two deep learning methods to address all the three tasks announced in ISIC 2017, i.e. lesion segmentation (task 1), lesion dermoscopic feature extraction (task 2) and lesion classification (task 3). A deep learning framework consisting of two fully-convolutional residual networks (FCRN) is proposed to simultaneously produce the segmentation result and the coarse classification result. A lesion index calculation unit (LICU) is developed to refine the coarse classification results by calculating the distance heat-map. A straight-forward CNN is proposed for the dermoscopic feature extraction task. To our best knowledges, we are not aware of any previous work proposed for this task. The proposed deep learning frameworks were evaluated on the ISIC 2017 testing set. Experimental results show the promising accuracies of our frameworks, i.e. 0.718 for task 1, 0.833 for task 2 and 0.823 for task 3 were achieved.