Attention-based Skin Cancer Classification Through Hyperspectral Imaging

Abstract

In recent years, hyperspectral imaging has been employed in several medical applications, targeting automatic diagnosis of different diseases. These images showed good performance in identifying different types of cancers. Among the methods used for classification, machine learning and deep learning techniques emerged as the most suitable algorithms to handle these data. In this paper, we propose a novel hyperspectral image classification architecture exploiting Vision Transformers. We validated the method on a real hyperspectral dataset containing 76 skin cancer images. Obtained results clearly highlight that the Vision Transforms are a suitable architecture for this task. Measured results outperform the state-of-the-art both in terms of false negative rates and of processing times. Finally, the attention mechanism is evaluated for the first time on medical hyperspectral images.