Attention-Enhanced Vision Transformer Model for Precise Skin Cancer Detection

Skin cancer is one of the most prevalent and potentially fatal diseases, requiring early and accurate detection for effective treatment. Recent advances in deep learning have significantly improved automated skin lesion classification, but traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) struggle with capturing long-range dependencies in dermoscopic images. To address this limitation, we propose a Preprocessing-Optimized Vision Transformer (ViT) Model that enhances lesion detection using attention-based feature fusion. Our methodology includes contrast enhancement (CLAHE), hair removal (DullRazor), lesion segmentation (K-Means + Otsu's Thresholding), and data augmentation, ensuring robust model training. The proposed Attention-Enhanced ViT Model effectively learns global contextual features from dermoscopic images through self-attention mechanisms. The proposed model is evaluated our model on the ISIC Skin Cancer Dataset, achieving an accuracy of 94.6%, precision of 92.8%, recall of 93.5%, and an AUC-ROC score of 0.97, outperforming traditional CNN-based models such as ResNet50 (92.1 % accuracy) and EfficientNet-B0 (93.3% accuracy). Our results demonstrate that integrating preprocessing techniques with Vision Transformers significantly enhances classification performance, making this approach a viable solution for real-world computer-aided dermatology.