Enhancing skin lesion classification with advanced deep learning ensemble models: a path towards accurate medical diagnostics

Skin cancer, including the highly lethal malignant melanoma, poses a significant global health challenge with a rising incidence rate. Early detection plays a pivotal role in improving survival rates. This study aims to develop an advanced deep learning-based approach for accurate skin lesion classification, addressing challenges such as limited data availability, class imbalance, and noise. Modern deep neural network designs, such as ResNeXt101, SeResNeXt101, ResNet152V2, DenseNet201, GoogLeNet, and Xception, which are used in the study and ze optimised using the SGD technique. The dataset comprises diverse skin lesion images from the HAM10000 and ISIC datasets. Noise and artifacts are tackled using image inpainting, and data augmentation techniques enhance training sample diversity. The ensemble technique is utilized, creating both average and weighted average ensemble models. Grid search optimizes model weight distribution. The individual models exhibit varying performance, with metrics including recall, precision, F1 score, and MCC. The "Average ensemble model" achieves harmonious balance, emphasizing precision, F1 score, and recall, yielding high performance. The "Weighted ensemble model" capitalizes on individual models' strengths, showcasing heightened precision and MCC, yielding outstanding performance. The ensemble models consistently outperform individual models, with the average ensemble model attaining a macro-average ROC-AUC score of 96 % and the weighted ensemble model achieving a macro-average ROC-AUC score of 97 %. This research demonstrates the efficacy of ensemble techniques in significantly improving skin lesion classification accuracy. By harnessing the strengths of individual models and addressing their limitations, the ensemble models exhibit robust and reliable performance across various metrics. The findings underscore the potential of ensemble techniques in enhancing medical diagnostics and contributing to improved patient outcomes in skin lesion diagnosis.