Anomaly Detection for Skin Disease Images Using Variational Autoencoder
This work addresses the problem of detecting skin diseases from images for medical diagnostics, but it is incremental as it applies an existing method to a new domain.
The paper tackles anomaly detection for skin disease images by applying a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) trained on normal data, achieving an overall AUCROC of 0.779 and up to 0.872 for specific diseases like melanoma and actinic keratosis.
In this paper, we demonstrate the potential of applying Variational Autoencoder (VAE) [10] for anomaly detection in skin disease images. VAE is a class of deep generative models which is trained by maximizing the evidence lower bound of data distribution [10]. When trained on only normal data, the resulting model is able to perform efficient inference and to determine if a test image is normal or not. We perform experiments on ISIC2018 Challenge Disease Classification dataset (Task 3) and compare different methods to use VAE to detect anomaly. The model is able to detect all diseases with 0.779 AUCROC. If we focus on specific diseases, the model is able to detect melanoma with 0.864 AUCROC and detect actinic keratosis with 0.872 AUCROC, even if it only sees the images of nevus. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first applied work of deep generative models for anomaly detection in dermatology.