State-of-the-art machine learning techniques for melanoma skin cancer detection and classification: a comprehensive review

Skin cancer is among the most common and lethal cancer types, with the number of cases increasing dramatically worldwide. If not diagnosed in the nascent stages, it can lead to metastases, resulting in high mortality rates. Skin cancer can be cured if detected early. Consequently, timely and accurate diagnosis of such cancers is currently a key research objective. Various machine learning technologies have been employed in computer-aided diagnosis of skin cancer detection and malignancy classification. Machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) involving models and algorithms which can learn from data and generate predictions on previously unseen data. The traditional biopsy method is applied to diagnose skin cancer, which is a tedious and expensive procedure. Alternatively, machine learning algorithms for cancer diagnosis can aid in its early detection, lowering the workload of specialists while simultaneously enhancing skin lesion diagnostics. This article presented a critical review of select state-of-the-art machine learning techniques used to detect skin cancer. Several studies had been collected, and an analysis of the performance of k-nearest neighbors, support vector machine, and convolutional neural networks algorithms on benchmark datasets was conducted. The shortcomings and disadvantages of each algorithm were briefly discussed. Challenges in detecting skin cancer were highlighted and the scope for future research was proposed.