A comparative study of deep learning architectures on melanoma detection.

Melanoma is the most aggressive type of skin cancer, which significantly reduces the life expectancy. Early detection of melanoma can reduce the morbidity and mortality associated with skin cancer. Dermoscopic images acquired by dermoscopic instruments are used in computational analysis for skin cancer detection. However, some image quality limitations such as noises, shadows, artefacts exist that could compromise the robustness of the skin image analysis. Hence, developing an automatic intelligent system for skin cancer diagnosis with accurate detection rate is crucial. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks in dermoscopic images of skin lesions. Our experiment is conducted on a graphics processing unit (GPU) to speed up the training and deployment process. To enhance the quality of images, we employ different pre-processing steps. We also apply data augmentation methodology such as horizontal and vertical flipping techniques to address the class skewness problem. Both pre-processing and data augmentation could help to improve the final accuracy.