Deep Learning With Optical Coherence Tomography for Melanoma Identification and Risk Prediction

Malignant melanoma is the most severe skin cancer with a rising incidence rate. Several noninvasive image techniques and computer-aided diagnosis systems have been developed to help find melanoma in its early stages. However, most previous research utilized dermoscopic images to build a diagnosis model, and only a few used prospective datasets. This study develops and evaluates a convolutional neural network (CNN) for melanoma identification and risk prediction using optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging of mice skin. Longitudinal tests are performed on four animal models: melanoma mice, dysplastic nevus mice, and their respective controls. The CNN classifies melanoma and healthy tissues with high sensitivity (0.99) and specificity (0.98) and also assigns a risk score to each image based on the probability of melanoma presence, which may facilitate early diagnosis and management of melanoma in clinical settings.