# Dermoscopic Dark Corner Artifacts Removal: Friend or Foe?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13446 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13446/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (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)
- [Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection: A Challenge at the 2017 International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05006/) (2017)
- [BCN20000: Dermoscopic Lesions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02288/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Deep Neural Networks Trained on Clinical Images in Dermatology with the Fitzpatrick 17k Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09957/) (2021)
- [A Patient-Centric Dataset of Images and Metadata for Identifying Melanomas Using Clinical Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07360/) (2020)
- [Skin Lesion Classification Using Hybrid Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08434/) (2017)
- [Detecting hidden signs of diabetes in external eye photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11732/) (2020)
- [Saliency-based segmentation of dermoscopic images using color information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13179/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [An Enhanced Harmonic Densely Connected Hybrid Transformer Network Architecture for Chronic Wound Segmentation Utilising Multi-Colour Space Tensor Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03359/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Random Fields as an Abstract Representation of Patient Metadata for Multimodal Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05214/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

One of the more significant obstacles in classification of skin cancer is the presence of artifacts. This paper investigates the effect of dark corner artifacts, which result from the use of dermoscopes, on the performance of a deep learning binary classification task. Previous research attempted to remove and inpaint dark corner artifacts, with the intention of creating an ideal condition for models. However, such research has been shown to be inconclusive due to lack of available datasets labelled with dark corner artifacts and detailed analysis and discussion. To address these issues, we label 10,250 skin lesion images from publicly available datasets and introduce a balanced dataset with an equal number of melanoma and non-melanoma cases. The training set comprises 6126 images without artifacts, and the testing set comprises 4124 images with dark corner artifacts. We conduct three experiments to provide new understanding on the effects of dark corner artifacts, including inpainted and synthetically generated examples, on a deep learning method. Our results suggest that introducing synthetic dark corner artifacts which have been superimposed onto the training set improved model performance, particularly in terms of the true negative rate. This indicates that deep learning learnt to ignore dark corner artifacts, rather than treating it as melanoma, when dark corner artifacts were introduced into the training set. Further, we propose a new approach to quantifying heatmaps indicating network focus using a root mean square measure of the brightness intensity in the different regions of the heatmaps. This paper provides a new guideline for skin lesions analysis with an emphasis on reproducibility.