# Malignancy Prediction and Lesion Identification from Clinical Dermatological Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.02652 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02652/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection 2018: A Challenge Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03368/) (2019)
- [Classifying and Segmenting Microscopy Images Using Convolutional Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05286/) (2015)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider machine-learning-based malignancy prediction and lesion identification from clinical dermatological images, which can be indistinctly acquired via smartphone or dermoscopy capture. Additionally, we do not assume that images contain single lesions, thus the framework supports both focal or wide-field images. Specifically, we propose a two-stage approach in which we first identify all lesions present in the image regardless of sub-type or likelihood of malignancy, then it estimates their likelihood of malignancy, and through aggregation, it also generates an image-level likelihood of malignancy that can be used for high-level screening processes. Further, we consider augmenting the proposed approach with clinical covariates (from electronic health records) and publicly available data (the ISIC dataset). Comprehensive experiments validated on an independent test dataset demonstrate that i) the proposed approach outperforms alternative model architectures; ii) the model based on images outperforms a pure clinical model by a large margin, and the combination of images and clinical data does not significantly improves over the image-only model; and iii) the proposed framework offers comparable performance in terms of malignancy classification relative to three board certified dermatologists with different levels of experience.