Improving Skin Lesion Classification with Pretrained Deep Learning Models

Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer. Cancer can be defined as a disease characterized by the uncontrolled division and spread of cells. As with other types of cancer, early diagnosis and treatment play a crucial role in combating skin cancer. Since diagnosis is made through visual examination, factors such as the level of expertise and image artifacts negatively affect diagnostic accuracy and slow down the process.Computer-aided applications used to analyze such images provide faster and more accurate results. Additionally, these methods eliminate factors that reduce diagnostic accuracy during the classification and segmentation of skin lesions.This study classifies skin cancer to benign or malignant using deep learning and machine learning methods. In particular, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown promising results in medical image classification. The study evaluates six pre-trained CNN models - VGG16, EfficientNetB7, EfficientNetV2L, DenseNet, ConvNeXtBase and MobileNet - for binary skin lesion classification using the ISIC 2019 dataset. The study first preprocesses and balances the data to enhance performance. The results indicate that the ConvNeXtBase model achieved the highest success with accuracy rate of 84.63% after balancing the data that we have.