| Melanoma, a severe and life-threatening skin cancer, is commonly misdiagnosed or left undiagnosed. Advances in artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning, have enabled the design and implementation of intelligent solutions to skin lesion detection and classification from visible light images, which are capable of performing early and accurate diagnosis of melanoma and other types of skin diseases. This work presents solutions to the problems of skin lesion segmentation and classification. The proposed classification approach leverages convolutional neural networks and transfer learning. Additionally, the impact of segmentation (i.e., isolating the lesion from the rest of the image) on the performance of the classifier is investigated, leading to the conclusion that there is an optimal region between "dermatologist segmented" and "not segmented" that produces best results, suggesting that the context around a lesion is helpful as the model is trained and built. Generative adversarial networks, in the context of extending limited datasets by creating synthetic samples of skin lesions, are also explored. The robustness and security of skin lesion classifiers using convolutional neural networks are examined and stress-tested by implementing adversarial examples. |
