Skin Lesion Classification Using Collective Intelligence of Multiple Neural Networks

Skin lesion detection and analysis are very important because skin cancer must be found in its early stages and treated immediately. Once installed in the body, skin cancer can easily spread to other body parts. Early detection would represent a very important aspect since, by ensuring correct treatment, it could be curable. Thus, by taking all these issues into consideration, there is a need for highly accurate computer-aided systems to assist medical staff in the early detection of malignant skin lesions. In this paper, we propose a skin lesion classification system based on deep learning techniques and collective intelligence, which involves multiple convolutional neural networks, trained on the HAM10000 dataset, which is able to predict seven skin lesions including melanoma. The convolutional neural networks experimentally chosen, considering their performances, to implement the collective intelligence-based system for this purpose are: AlexNet, GoogLeNet, GoogLeNet-Places365, MobileNet-V2, Xception, ResNet-50, ResNet-101, InceptionResNet-V2 and DenseNet201. We then analyzed the performances of each of the above-mentioned convolutional neural networks to obtain a weight matrix whose elements are weights associated with neural networks and classes of lesions. Based on this matrix, a new decision matrix was used to build the multi-network ensemble system (Collective Intelligence-based System), combining each of individual neural network decision into a decision fusion module (Collective Decision Block). This module would then have the responsibility to take a final and more accurate decision related to the prediction based on the associated weights of each network output. The validation accuracy of the proposed system is about 3 percent better than that of the best performing individual network.