Attention-aware Deep Learning Models for Dermoscopic Image Classification for Skin Disease Diagnosis.

Abstract

Background: The skin, being the largest organ in the human body, plays a vital protective role. Skin lesions are changes in the appearance of the skin, such as bumps, sores, lumps, patches, and discoloration. If not identified and treated promptly, skin lesion diseases would become a serious and worrisome problem for society due to their detrimental effects. However, visually inspecting skin lesions during medical examinations can be challenging due to their similarities.

Objective: The proposed research aimed at leveraging technological advancements, particularly deep learning methods, to analyze dermoscopic images of skin lesions and make accurate predictions, thereby aiding in diagnosis.

Methods: The proposed study utilized four pre-trained CNN architectures, RegNetX, EfficientNetB3, VGG19, and ResNet-152, for the multi-class classification of seven types of skin diseases based on dermoscopic images. The significant finding of this study was the integration of attention mechanisms, specifically channel-wise and spatial attention, into these CNN variants. These mechanisms allowed the models to focus on the most relevant regions of the dermoscopic images, enhancing feature extraction and improving classification accuracy. Hyperparameters of the models were optimized using Bayesian optimization, a probabilistic model-based technique that efficiently uses the hyperparameter space to find the optimal configuration for the developed models.

Results: The performance of these models was evaluated, and it was found that RegNetX outperformed the other models with an accuracy of 98.61%. RegNetX showed robust performance when integrated with both channel-wise and spatial attention mechanisms, indicating its effectiveness in focusing on significant features within the dermoscopic images.

Conclusion: The results demonstrated the effectiveness of attention-aware deep learning models in accurately classifying various skin diseases from dermoscopic images. By integrating attention mechanisms, these models can focus on the most relevant features within the images, thereby improving their classification accuracy. The results confirmed that RegNetX, integrated with optimized attention mechanisms, can provide robust, accurate diagnoses, which is critical for early detection and treatment of skin diseases.