Skin lesion classification by ensembles of deep convolutional networks and regularly spaced shifting

Abstract

Skin lesions are caused due to multiple factors, like allergies, infections, exposition to the sun, etc. These skin diseases have become a challenge in medical diagnosis due to visual similarities, where image classification is an essential task to achieve an adequate diagnostic of different lesions. Melanoma is one of the best-known types of skin lesions due to the vast majority of skin cancer deaths. In this work, we propose an ensemble of improved convolutional neural networks combined with a test-time regularly spaced shifting technique for skin lesion classification. The shifting technique builds several versions of the test input image, which are shifted by displacement vectors that lie on a regular lattice in the plane of possible shifts. These shifted versions of the test image are subsequently passed on to each of the classifiers of an ensemble. Finally, all the outputs from the classifiers are combined to yield the final result. Experiment results show a significant improvement on the well-known HAM10000 dataset in terms of accuracy and Fscore. In particular, it is demonstrated that our combination of ensembles with test-time regularly spaced shifting yields better performance than any of the two methods when applied alone.This work is partially supported by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities of Spain under grant RTI2018-094645-B-I00, project name Automated detection with low-cost hardware of unusual activities in video sequences. It is also partially supported by the Autonomous Government of Andalusia (Spain) under project UMA18-FEDERJA-084, project name Detection of anomalous behavior agents by deep learning in low-cost video surveillance intelligent systems. All of them include funds from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). It is also partially supported by the University of Malaga (Spain) under grants B1-2019_02, project name Self-Organizing Neural Systems for Non-Stationary Environments, and B1-2019_01, project name Anomaly detection on roads by moving cameras. The authors thankfully acknowledge the computer resources, technical expertise and assistance provided by the SCBI (Supercomputing and Bioinformatics) center of the University of Málaga. They also gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of two Titan X GPUs. The authors acknowledge the funding from the Universidad de Málaga. Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málaga / CBUA