Classification of skin cancer with deep transfer learning method

Skin cancer is a significant threat to human health. The key solution to completely treating skin cancer patients is early detection of lesions, which are the basis of skin cancer. With the advancement of artificial intelligence technology, significant progress has been made in developing automated approaches to help dermatologists detect skin cancer. In this study, eight different transfer learning networks are examined on the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) dataset (64000 images) for the classification of skin cancer. The models used in the study are DenseNet121, Xception, InceptionResNetV2, ResNet50, Inception, EfficentNetB6, VGG16, and MobileNetV2 which were successful in various studies recently. In the preprocessing part of the study, the dataset is split into three parts training, validation, and testing. The results of the study showed that some transfer learning models are appropriate for classification success, with high classification accuracies. With an accuracy rate of 99.6%, the finetuned DenseNet121 model outperformed all other pre-trained models used in the study. In addition, when the ensemble learning method was applied with the best three models (DenseNet121, MobileNetV2, and Xception), 99.96% accuracy was obtained.