Lightweight skin cancer detection IP hardware implementation using cycle expansion and optimal computation arrays...

Skin cancer is recognized as one of the most perilous diseases globally. In the field of medical image classification, precise identification of early-stage skin lesions is imperative for accurate diagnosis. However, deploying these algorithms on low-cost devices and attaining high-efficiency operation with minimal energy consumption poses a formidable challenge due to their intricate computational demands. This study proposes a lightweight hardware design based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) for real-time processing of skin disease classifiers on portable devices. Our skin cancer recognition processor utilizes an optimally parallel designed processing engine (PE) for global computation, which greatly reduces hardware resource utilization by multiplexing of computational unit circuits. In addition, a design approach that provides loop unrolling effectively reduces the number of data accesses, thereby reducing computational complexity and logic resource requirements. The hardware circuits in this design perform data inference in convolutional, pooling, and fully connected layers based on 16-bit floating-point numbers. Evaluation of the HAM10000 database dataset shows that the architecture achieves an average classification accuracy of 97.8 %. We are the first to implement an all-hardware FPGA-based skin cancer detection platform that offers a 3.5x speedup in recognition compared to existing skin cancer accelerators at 50 MHz while consuming only 0.48 W of power. The implementation of this hardware architecture meets the major constraints of portable devices, featuring low resource utilization, low power consumption, and cost-effectiveness, while still providing efficient classification and high accuracy results.