An Integrated Ensemble Network Model for Skin Abnormality Detection with Combined Textural Features

Melanoma is the most lethal of all skin cancers. This necessitates the need for a machine learning-driven skin cancer detection system to help medical professionals with early detection. We propose an integrated multi-modal ensemble framework that combines deep convolution neural representations with extracted lesion characteristics and patient meta-data. This study intends to integrate transfer-learned image features, global and local textural information, and patient data using a custom generator to diagnose skin cancer accurately. The architecture combines multiple models in a weighted ensemble strategy, which was trained and validated on specific and distinct datasets, namely, HAM10000, BCN20000 + MSK, and the ISIC2020 challenge datasets. They were evaluated on the mean values of precision, recall or sensitivity, specificity, and balanced accuracy metrics. Sensitivity and specificity play a major role in diagnostics. The model achieved sensitivities of 94.15%, 86.69%, and 86.48% and specificity of 99.24%, 97.73%, and 98.51% for each dataset, respectively. Additionally, the accuracy on the malignant classes of the three datasets was 94%, 87.33%, and 89%, which is significantly higher than the physician recognition rate. The results demonstrate that our weighted voting integrated ensemble strategy outperforms existing models and could serve as an initial diagnostic tool for skin cancer.