Using Transfer Learning and Hierarchical Classifier to Diagnose Melanoma From Dermoscopic Images

The deadliest form of skin cancer is melanoma, and if detected in time, it is curable. Detection of melanoma using biopsy is a painful and time-consuming task. Alternate means are being used by medical experts to diagnose melanoma by extracting features from skin lesion images. Medical image diagnosis requires intelligent systems. Many intelligent systems based on image processing and machine learning have been proposed by researchers in the past to detect different kinds of diseases that are successfully used by healthcare organisations worldwide. Intelligent systems to detect melanoma from skin lesion images are also evolving with the aim of improving the accuracy of melanoma detection. Feature extraction plays a critical role. In this paper, a model is proposed in which features are extracted using convolutional neural network (CNN) with transfer learning and a hierarchical classifier consisting of random forest (RF), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), and adaboost is used to detect melanoma using the extracted features. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed model.