Skin Cancer Diseases Classification using Deep Convolutional Neural Network with Transfer Learning Model

Abstract Skin cancer is becoming increasingly common. Fortunately, early discovery can greatly improve the odds of a patient being healed. Many Artificial Intelligence based approaches to classify skin lesions have recently been proposed. but these approaches suffer from limited classification accuracy. Deep convolutional neural networks show potential for better classification of cancer lesions. This paper presents a fine-tuning on Xception pretrained model for classification of skin lesions by adding a group of layers after the basic ones of the Xception model and all model weights are set to be trained. The model is fine-tuned over HAM10,000 dataset seven classes by augmentation approach to mitigate the data imbalance effect and conducted a comparative study with the most up to date approaches. In comparison to prior models, the results indicate that the proposed model is both efficient and reliable.