Enhancing Skin Lesion Diagnosis with Ensemble Learning
This work addresses the need for improved diagnostic tools in dermatology, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ensemble learning techniques with a customized architecture.
This study tackled the problem of accurately diagnosing skin lesions using deep learning on the HAM10000 dataset, achieving an accuracy of 0.867 and an AUC of 0.96 with their proposed SkinNet model, which outperformed individual models and other ensemble methods.
Skin lesions are an increasingly significant medical concern, varying widely in severity from benign to cancerous. Accurate diagnosis is essential for ensuring timely and appropriate treatment. This study examines the implementation of deep learning methods to assist in the diagnosis of skin lesions using the HAM10000 dataset, which contains seven distinct types of lesions. First, we evaluated three pre-trained models: MobileNetV2, ResNet18, and VGG11, achieving accuracies of 0.798, 0.802, and 0.805, respectively. To further enhance classification accuracy, we developed ensemble models employing max voting, average voting, and stacking, resulting in accuracies of 0.803, 0.82, and 0.83. Building on the best-performing ensemble learning model, stacking, we developed our proposed model, SkinNet, which incorporates a customized architecture and fine-tuning, achieving an accuracy of 0.867 and an AUC of 0.96. This substantial improvement over individual models demonstrates the effectiveness of ensemble learning in improving skin lesion classification.