Optimized Convolutional Neural Network Models for Skin Lesion Classification

Skin cancer is one of the most severe diseases, and medical imaging is among the main tools for cancer diagnosis. The images provide information on the evolutionary stage, size, and location of tumor lesions. This paper focuses on the classification of skin lesion images considering a framework of four experiments to analyze the classification performance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in distinguishing different skin lesions. The CNNs are based on transfer learning, taking advantage of ImageNet weights. Accordingly, in each experiment, different workflow stages are tested, including data augmentation and fine-tuning optimization. Three CNN models based on DenseNet-201, Inception-ResNet-V2, and Inception-V3 are proposed and compared using the HAM10000 dataset. The results obtained by the three models demonstrate accuracies of 98%, 97%, and 96%, respectively. Finally, the best model is tested on the ISIC 2019 dataset showing an accuracy of 93%. The proposed methodology using CNN represents a helpful tool to accurately diagnose skin cancer disease.     

Hybrid fully convolutional networks-based skin lesion segmentation and melanoma detection using deep feature

Fully convolutional networks (FCNs) take the input of arbitrary size and produce correspondingly sized output with efficient inference and learning. The automatic diagnosis of melanoma is very essential for reducing the mortality rate by identifying the disease in earlier stages. A two-stage framework is used for implementing the melanoma detection, segmentation of skin lesion, and identification of melanoma lesions. Two FCNs based on VGG-16 and GoogLeNet are incorporated for improving the segmentation accuracy. A hybrid framework is used for incorporating these two FCNs. The classification is done by extracting the feature from segmented lesion by using deep residual network and a hand-crafted feature. Classification is done by support vector machine. The performance analysis of our framework gives a promising accuracy, that is, 0.8892 for classification in ISBI 2016 dataset and 0.853 for ISIC 2017 dataset.     

Arithmetic Optimization with Ensemble Deep Transfer Learning BasedMelanoma Classification

Melanoma is a skin disease with high mortality rate while early diagnoses of the disease can increase the survival chances of patients. It is challenging to automatically diagnose melanoma from dermoscopic skin samples. Computer-Aided Diagnostic (CAD) tool saves time and effort in diagnosing melanoma compared to existing medical approaches. In this background, there is a need exists to design an automated classification model for melanoma that can utilize deep and rich feature datasets of an image for disease classification. The current study develops an Intelligent Arithmetic Optimization with Ensemble Deep Transfer Learning Based Melanoma Classification (IAOEDTT-MC) model. The proposed IAOEDTT-MC model focuses on identification and classification of melanoma from dermoscopic images. To accomplish this, IAOEDTT-MC model applies image preprocessing at the initial stage in which Gabor Filtering (GF) technique is utilized. In addition, U-Net segmentation approach is employed to segment the lesion regions in dermoscopic images. Besides, an ensemble of DL models including ResNet50 and ElasticNet models is applied in this study. Moreover, AO algorithm with Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) method is utilized for identification and classification of melanoma. The proposed IAOEDTT-MC method was experimentally validated with the help of benchmark datasets and the proposed model attained maximum accuracy of 92.09% on ISIC 2017 dataset.     

Hybridization of CNN with LBP for Classification of Melanoma Images

Skin cancer (melanoma) is one of the most aggressive of the cancers and the prevalence has significantly increased due to increased exposure to ultraviolet radiation. Therefore, timely detection and management of the lesion is a critical consideration in order to improve lifestyle and reduce mortality. To this end, we have designed, implemented and analyzed a hybrid approach entailing convolutional neural networks (CNN) and local binary patterns (LBP). The experiments have been performed on publicly accessible datasets ISIC 2017, 2018 and 2019 (HAM10000) with data augmentation for in-distribution generalization. As a novel contribution, the CNN architecture is enhanced with an intelligible layer, LBP, that extracts the pertinent visual patterns. Classification of Basal Cell Carcinoma, Actinic Keratosis, Melanoma and Squamous Cell Carcinoma has been evaluated on 8035 and 3494 cases for training and testing, respectively. Experimental outcomes with cross-validation depict a plausible performance with an average accuracy of 97.29%, sensitivity of 95.63% and specificity of 97.90%. Hence, the proposed approach can be used in research and clinical settings to provide second opinions, closely approximating experts’ intuition.     

Diagnosis of Various Skin Cancer Lesions Based on Fine-Tuned ResNet50 Deep Network

With the massive success of deep networks, there have been significant efforts to analyze cancer diseases, especially skin cancer. For this purpose, this work investigates the capability of deep networks in diagnosing a variety of dermoscopic lesion images. This paper aims to develop and fine-tune a deep learning architecture to diagnose different skin cancer grades based on dermatoscopic images. Fine-tuning is a powerful method to obtain enhanced classification results by the customized pre-trained network. Regularization, batch normalization, and hyperparameter optimization are performed for fine-tuning the proposed deep network. The proposed fine-tuned ResNet50 model successfully classified 7-respective classes of dermoscopic lesions using the publicly available HAM10000 dataset. The developed deep model was compared against two powerful models, i.e., InceptionV3 and VGG16, using the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and the area under the curve (AUC). The evaluation results show that the proposed model achieved higher results than some recent and robust models.     

Skin lesion classification based on the VGG-16 fusion residual structure

The analysis of skin lesion images is challenging due to the high interclass similarity and intraclass variance. Therefore, improving the ability to automatically classify based on skin lesion images is necessary to help physicians classify skin lesions. We propose a network model based on the Visual Geometry Group Network (VGG-16) fusion residual structure for the multiclass classification of skin lesions. based on the VGG-16 network, we simplify and improve the network structure by adding a preprocessing layer (CBRM layer) and fusing the residual structure. We also use a hair removal algorithm and perform six data augmentation operations on a small number of skin lesion images to balance the total number of the seven skin lesions in the dataset. The model was evaluated on the ISIC2018 dataset. Experiments have shown that our network model achieves good classification performance, with a test accuracy rate of 88.14% and a macroaverage of 98%.     

Handling dataset dependence with model ensembles for skin lesion classification from dermoscopic and clinical images

Dataset dependence affects many real-life applications of machine learning: the performance of a model trained on a dataset is significantly worse on samples from another dataset than on new, unseen samples from the original one. This issue is particularly acute for small and somewhat specific databases in medical applications; the automated recognition of melanoma from skin lesion images is a prime example. We document dataset dependence in dermoscopic skin lesion image classification using three publicly available medium size datasets. Standard machine learning techniques aimed at improving the predictive power of a model might enhance performance slightly, but the gain is small, the dataset dependence is not reduced, and the best combination depends on model details. We demonstrate that simple differences in image statistics account for only 5% of the dataset dependence. We suggest a solution with two essential ingredients: using an ensemble of heterogeneous models, and training on a heterogeneous dataset. Our ensemble consists of 29 convolutional networks, some of which are trained on features considered important by dermatologists; the networks' output is fused by a trained committee machine. The combined International Skin Imaging Collaboration dataset is suitable for training, as it is multi-source, produced by a collaboration of a number of clinics over the world. Building on the strengths of the ensemble, it is applied to a related problem as well: recognizing melanoma based on clinical (non-dermoscopic) images. This is a harder problem as both the image quality is lower than those of the dermoscopic ones and the available public datasets are smaller and scarcer. We explored various training strategies and showed that 79% balanced accuracy can be achieved for binary classification averaged over three clinical datasets.     

A novel hybrid artificial neural network technique for the early skin cancer diagnosis using color space conversions of original images

In this study, an innovative hybrid machine learning-technique is used for the early skin cancer diagnosis fusing Convolutional Neural Network and Multilayer Perceptron to analyze images and information related to the skin cancer. This information is extracted manually after applying different color space conversions on the original images for better screening of the lesions. The proposed architecture is compared with standalone architecture in addition to some other techniques by commonly used evaluation metrics. HAM10000 dataset is used for training and testing as this data contain seven different skin lesions. The novelty of the proposed hybrid model is the structure of the network which handles structured data (patients' metadata and other useful features from different color spaces related to the illumination, energy, darkness, etc.) and unstructured data (images). The results show an overall 86%, 95% top-1 and top-2 accuracy respectively, and 96% area under the curve for the seven classes. The study demonstrates the superiority of the proposed hybrid model with a 2% improvement in the accuracy over the standalone model and a promising behavior as compared to the ensemble techniques. The follow-up research will include more patient data to develop a skin cancer detection device.     

Fitness adaptive deer hunting-based region growing and recurrent neural network for melanoma skin cancer detection

This proposal aims to enhance the accuracy of a dermoscopic skin cancer diagnosis with the aid of novel deep learning architecture. The proposed skin cancer detection model involves four main steps: (a) preprocessing, (b) segmentation, (c) feature extraction, and (d) classification. The dermoscopic images initially subjected to a preprocessing step that includes image enhancement and hair removal. After preprocessing, the segmentation of lesion is deployed by an optimized region growing algorithm. In the feature extraction phase, local features, color morphology features, and morphological transformation-based features are extracted. Moreover, the classification phase uses a modified deep learning algorithm by merging the optimization concept into recurrent neural network (RNN). As the main contribution, the region growing and RNN improved by the modified deer hunting optimization algorithm (DHOA) termed as Fitness Adaptive DHOA (FA-DHOA). Finally, the analysis has been performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Race Classification Using Deep Learning

Race classification is a long-standing challenge in the field of face image analysis. The investigation of salient facial features is an important task to avoid processing all face parts. Face segmentation strongly benefits several face analysis tasks, including ethnicity and race classification. We propose a race-classification algorithm using a prior face segmentation framework. A deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) was used to construct a face segmentation model. For training the DCNN, we label face images according to seven different classes, that is, nose, skin, hair, eyes, brows, back, and mouth. The DCNN model developed in the first phase was used to create segmentation results. The probabilistic classification method is used, and probability maps (PMs) are created for each semantic class. We investigated five salient facial features from among seven that help in race classification. Features are extracted from the PMs of five classes, and a new model is trained based on the DCNN. We assessed the performance of the proposed race classification method on four standard face datasets, reporting superior results compared with previous studies.     

Intelligent Multiclass Skin Cancer Detection Using Convolution Neural Networks

The worldwide mortality rate due to cancer is second only to cardiovascular diseases. The discovery of image processing, latest artificial intelligence techniques, and upcoming algorithms can be used to effectively diagnose and prognose cancer faster and reduce the mortality rate. Efficiently applying these latest techniques has increased the survival chances during recent years. The research community is making significant continuous progress in developing automated tools to assist dermatologists in decision making. The datasets used for the experimentation and analysis are ISBI 2016, ISBI 2017, and HAM 10000. In this work pertained models are used to extract the efficient feature. The pertained models applied are ResNet, InceptionV3, and classical feature extraction techniques. Before that, efficient preprocessing is conducted on dermoscopic images by applying various data augmentation techniques. Further, for classification, convolution neural networks were implemented. To classify dermoscopic images on HAM 1000 Dataset, the maximum attained accuracy is 89.30% for the proposed technique. The other parameters for measuring the performance attained 87.34% (Sen), 86.33% (Pre), 88.44% (F1-S), and 11.30% false-negative rate (FNR). The class with the highest TP rate is 97.6% for Melanoma; whereas, the lowest TP rate was for the Dermatofibroma class. For dataset ISBI2016, the accuracy achieved is 97.0% with the proposed classifier, whereas the other parameters for validation are 96.12% (Sen), 97.01% (Pre), 96.3% (F1-S), and further 3.7% (FNR). For the experiment with the ISBI2017 dataset, Sen, Pre, F1-S, and FNR were 93.9%, 94.9%, 93.9%, and 5.2%, respectively.     

Brain Tumor Detection and Classification Using PSO and Convolutional Neural Network

Tumor detection has been an active research topic in recent years due to the high mortality rate. Computer vision (CV) and image processing techniques have recently become popular for detecting tumors in MRI images. The automated detection process is simpler and takes less time than manual processing. In addition, the difference in the expanding shape of brain tumor tissues complicates and complicates tumor detection for clinicians. We proposed a new framework for tumor detection as well as tumor classification into relevant categories in this paper. For tumor segmentation, the proposed framework employs the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, and for classification, the convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithm. Popular preprocessing techniques such as noise removal, image sharpening, and skull stripping are used at the start of the segmentation process. Then, PSO-based segmentation is applied. In the classification step, two pre-trained CNN models, alexnet and inception-V3, are used and trained using transfer learning. Using a serial approach, features are extracted from both trained models and fused features for final classification. For classification, a variety of machine learning classifiers are used. Average dice values on datasets BRATS-2018 and BRATS-2017 are 98.11 percent and 98.25 percent, respectively, whereas average jaccard values are 96.30 percent and 96.57% (Segmentation Results). The results were extended on the same datasets for classification and achieved 99.0% accuracy, sensitivity of 0.99, specificity of 0.99, and precision of 0.99. Finally, the proposed method is compared to state-of-the-art existing methods and outperforms them.     

基于双分支特征提取的轻量级图像分割算法

目的 为了提升彩色图像的分割精度，解决彩色图像分割中存在庞大计算成本和冗余参数的问题，本文提出一种双分支特征提取网络来解决上述问题。方法 双分支特征提取网络主要由语义信息分支和空间细节分支组成。语义信息分支通过在非对称残差模块中设置不同的空洞卷积率来获取输入图像不同尺度的上下文信息。空间细节分支是一个浅层且简单的网络，用于建立每个像素间的局部依赖关系以保留细节。在双分支之后连接一个特征聚合模块来有效地结合这2个分支的输出。结果 在没有任何预训练和后处理的情况下，在单块RTX2080Ti GPU上仅用0.91 M参数在Cityscapes数据集上以97帧/s的速度实现75.1%的分割准确性，在Camvid数据集上以107帧/s的推理速度取得了70.5%的分割效果。结论 通过大量实验证明，本文模型在分割准确性和效率之间取得了较好的平衡。     

Robust Magnification Independent Colon Biopsy Grading System over Multiple Data Sources

Automated grading of colon biopsy images across all magnifications is challenging because of tailored segmentation and dependent features on each magnification. This work presents a novel approach of robust magnification-independent colon cancer grading framework to distinguish colon biopsy images into four classes: normal, well, moderate, and poor. The contribution of this research is to develop a magnification invariant hybrid feature set comprising cartoon feature, Gabor wavelet, wavelet moments, HSV histogram, color auto-correlogram, color moments, and morphological features that can be used to characterize different grades. Besides, the classifier is modeled as a multiclass structure with six binary class Bayesian optimized random forest (BO-RF) classifiers. This study uses four datasets (two collected from Indian hospitals—Ishita Pathology Center (IPC) of 4X, 10X, and 40X and Aster Medcity (AMC) of 10X, 20X, and 40X—two benchmark datasets—gland segmentation (GlaS) of 20X and IMEDIATREAT of 10X) comprising multiple microscope magnifications. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the other methods used for colon cancer grading in terms of accuracy (97.25%-IPC, 94.40%-AMC, 97.58%-GlaS, 99.16%-Imediatreat), sensitivity (0.9725-IPC, 0.9440-AMC, 0.9807-GlaS, 0.9923-Imediatreat), specificity (0.9908-IPC, 0.9813-AMC, 0.9907-GlaS, 0.9971-Imediatreat) and F-score (0.9725-IPC, 0.9441-AMC, 0.9780-GlaS, 0.9923-Imediatreat). The generalizability of the model to any magnified input image is validated by training in one dataset and testing in another dataset, highlighting strong concordance in multiclass classification and evidencing its effective use in the first level of automatic biopsy grading and second opinion.     

An Effective Classifier Model for Imbalanced Network Attack Data

Recently, machine learning algorithms have been used in the detection and classification of network attacks. The performance of the algorithms has been evaluated by using benchmark network intrusion datasets such as DARPA98, KDD’99, NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, and Caida DDoS. However, these datasets have two major challenges: imbalanced data and high-dimensional data. Obtaining high accuracy for all attack types in the dataset allows for high accuracy in imbalanced datasets. On the other hand, having a large number of features increases the runtime load on the algorithms. A novel model is proposed in this paper to overcome these two concerns. The number of features in the model, which has been tested at CICIDS2017, is initially optimized by using genetic algorithms. This optimum feature set has been used to classify network attacks with six well-known classifiers according to high f1-score and g-mean value in minimum time. Afterwards, a multi-layer perceptron based ensemble learning approach has been applied to improve the models’ overall performance. The experimental results show that the suggested model is acceptable for feature selection as well as classifying network attacks in an imbalanced dataset, with a high f1-score (0.91) and g-mean (0.99) value. Furthermore, it has outperformed base classifier models and voting procedures.     

Automated diagnosis system for age‐related macular degeneration using hybrid features set from fundus images

Impairment to macula can cause loss of central vision. There are various macular disorders that can affect macular region and if not treated at an early stage can cause irreversible central vision loss. Age‐related macular degeneration (AMD) disorder is one of the most threading macular disorder. Bright lesion, drusens presence in macular region is known as the hallmark of AMD disorder. This bright lesion differentiation from other bright lesion like exudates is important for accurate diagnosis of AMD. Focus of this article is automated diagnosis of affected macular region by applying a hybrid features set containing textural, color, and structural/shape features for more accurate detection of AMD at an early stage using fundus images. These features also help to distinguish drusens from exudates. The proposed algorithm at first stage, detect macular region from input fundus image and then perform features extraction based on textural pattern, edge, and structural properties of macular region to classify abnormal macula from normal macula. For classification, we have used support vector machine (SVM), K‐nearest neighbor and neural networks but SVM classifier achieves high accuracy. The proposed algorithm is tested on publicly available STARE and locally available AFIO datasets. Attained sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of our proposed system are 97.5%, 95% and 95.45%, respectively, when applied on STARE dataset. When we have applied our proposed system on AFIO dataset, we have attained sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 93.3%, 92% and 92.34%, respectively.     

An automatic channel selection method based on the standard deviation of wavelet coefficients for motor imagery based brain–computer interfacing

The redundant data in multichannel electroencephalogram (EEG) signals significantly reduces the performance of brain–computer interface (BCI) systems. By removing redundant channels, a channel selection strategy increases the classification accuracy of BCI systems. In this work, a novel channel selection method (stdWC) based on the standard deviation of wavelet coefficients across channels is proposed to identify Motor Imagery (MI) based EEG signals. The wavelet coefficients are calculated by employing a Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) filter bank to decompose each trial from the EEG channel. The wavelet coefficient's standard deviation values are obtained across the channels, and these values are then sorted to determine the EEG channels with the highest standard deviation values. The channels with the largest wavelet coefficient divergence are chosen. MI trials are then spatially filtered with the Common Spatial Pattern (CSP), and CWT filter bank-based 2D images are generated from the spatially filtered trials. These images are then classified using a unique nine-layered convolutional neural network (CNN) model that combines two feature maps acquired with differing filter sizes. The proposed framework (stdWC-CSP-CNN) is evaluated using kappa score and classification accuracy on two publically accessible datasets (BCI Competition III dataset IVa and BCI Competition IV dataset 2a). The suggested framework achieved a mean test classification accuracy of 88.8% for dataset IVa from BCI Competition III and 75.03% for dataset 2a from BCI Competition IV, according to the results. The proposed channel selection method outperforms the other channel selection methods examined, according to the results. By rejecting redundant channels, the whole framework can improve the performance of MI-based BCIs.     

COVID-19 Infected Lung Computed Tomography Segmentation and Supervised Classification Approach

The purpose of this research is the segmentation of lungs computed tomography (CT) scan for the diagnosis of COVID-19 by using machine learning methods. Our dataset contains data from patients who are prone to the epidemic. It contains three types of lungs CT images (Normal, Pneumonia, and COVID-19) collected from two different sources; the first one is the Radiology Department of Nishtar Hospital Multan and Civil Hospital Bahawalpur, Pakistan, and the second one is a publicly free available medical imaging database known as Radiopaedia. For the preprocessing, a novel fuzzy c-mean automated region-growing segmentation approach is deployed to take an automated region of interest (ROIs) and acquire 52 hybrid statistical features for each ROIs. Also, 12 optimized statistical features are selected via the chi-square feature reduction technique. For the classification, five machine learning classifiers named as deep learning J4, multilayer perceptron, support vector machine, random forest, and naive Bayes are deployed to optimize the hybrid statistical features dataset. It is observed that the deep learning J4 has promising results (sensitivity and specificity: 0.987; accuracy: 98.67%) among all the deployed classifiers. As a complementary study, a statistical work is devoted to the use of a new statistical model to fit the main datasets of COVID-19 collected in Pakistan.     

Adaptive Binary Coding for Scene Classification Based on Convolutional Networks

With the rapid development of computer technology, millions of images are produced everyday by different sources. How to efficiently process these images and accurately discern the scene in them becomes an important but tough task. In this paper, we propose a novel supervised learning framework based on proposed adaptive binary coding for scene classification. Specifically, we first extract some high-level features of images under consideration based on available models trained on public datasets. Then, we further design a binary encoding method called one-hot encoding to make the feature representation more efficient. Benefiting from the proposed adaptive binary coding, our method is free of time to train or fine-tune the deep network and can effectively handle different applications. Experimental results on three public datasets, i.e., UIUC sports event dataset, MIT Indoor dataset, and UC Merced dataset in terms of three different classifiers, demonstrate that our method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods with large margins.     

Imbalanced Data Classification Using SVM Based on Improved Simulated Annealing Featuring Synthetic Data Generation and Reduction

Imbalanced data classification is one of the major problems in machine learning. This imbalanced dataset typically has significant differences in the number of data samples between its classes. In most cases, the performance of the machine learning algorithm such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) is affected when dealing with an imbalanced dataset. The classification accuracy is mostly skewed toward the majority class and poor results are exhibited in the prediction of minority-class samples. In this paper, a hybrid approach combining data pre-processing technique and SVM algorithm based on improved Simulated Annealing (SA) was proposed. Firstly, the data pre-processing technique which primarily aims at solving the resampling strategy of handling imbalanced datasets was proposed. In this technique, the data were first synthetically generated to equalize the number of samples between classes and followed by a reduction step to remove redundancy and duplicated data. Next is the training of a balanced dataset using SVM. Since this algorithm requires an iterative process to search for the best penalty parameter during training, an improved SA algorithm was proposed for this task. In this proposed improvement, a new acceptance criterion for the solution to be accepted in the SA algorithm was introduced to enhance the accuracy of the optimization process. Experimental works based on ten publicly available imbalanced datasets have demonstrated higher accuracy in the classification tasks using the proposed approach in comparison with the conventional implementation of SVM. Registering at an average of 89.65% of accuracy for the binary class classification has demonstrated the good performance of the proposed works.