Volume 40, Issue 10 e13435
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

M2CE: Multi-convolutional neural network ensemble approach for improved multiclass classification of skin lesion

Himanshu K. Gajera

Corresponding Author

Himanshu K. Gajera

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, Gujarat, India

Correspondence

Himanshu K. Gajera, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, Gujarat, India.

Email: [email protected]

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Deepak Ranjan Nayak

Deepak Ranjan Nayak

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

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Mukesh A. Zaveri

Mukesh A. Zaveri

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, Gujarat, India

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First published: 22 August 2023

Abstract

Due to inter-class homogeneity and intra-class variability, the classification of skin lesions in dermoscopy images has remained difficult. Although deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have achieved satisfactory performance for binary skin cancer classification, multiclass skin lesion classification is still an open problem due to the limited training samples and class imbalance issues. To tackle these issues, in this article, we propose a multi-CNN ensemble approach dubbed M 2 CE for multiclass skin lesion classification. The M 2 CE includes three individual CNN models, each helping in extracting different high-level features from skin images and thereby yielding different prediction results. First, we design a lightweight CNN model to extract prominent features and train it from scratch, which primarily aims at avoiding the data scarcity problem. Then, we ensemble two different pre-trained CNN models with the lightweight model to improve the performance and generalization capability. The proposed ensemble approach can effectively fuse the predictions of each individual CNN model using the averaging method. The M 2 CE approach is validated using a benchmark data set, HAM10000, which contains skin lesion images of seven different classes. The results demonstrate that the M 2 CE outperforms base CNN models and state-of-the-art approaches without using any external data.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The dataset is publicly available.

The full text of this article hosted at iucr.org is unavailable due to technical difficulties.