Targeted Ensemble Machine Classification Approach for Supporting IoT Enabled Skin Disease Detection

The fast development of the Internet of Things (IoT) changes our life in many areas, especially in the health domain. For example, remote disease diagnosis can be achieved more efficiently with advanced IoT-technologies which not only include hardware but also smart IoT data processing and learning algorithms, e.g. image-based disease classification. In this paper, we work in a specific area of skin condition classification. This research work aims to provide an implementable solution for IoT-led remote skin disease diagnosis applications. The research output can be concluded into three folders. The first folder is about dynamic AI model configuration supported IoT-Fog-Cloud remote diagnosis architecture with hardware examples. The second folder is the evaluation survey regarding the performances of machine learning models for skin disease detection. The evaluation contains a variety of data processing methods and their aggregations. The evaluation takes account of both training-testing and cross-testing validations on all seven conditions and individual condition. In addition, the HAM10000 dataset is picked for the evaluation process according to the suitability comparisons to other relevant datasets. In the evaluation, we discuss the earlier work of ANN, SVM and KNN models, but the evaluation process mainly focuses on six widely applied Deep Learning models of VGG16, Inception, Xception, MobileNet, ResNet50 and DenseNet161. The result shows that each of the top four models for the major seven skin conditions has better performance for the specific condition than others. Based on the evaluation discovery, the last folder proposes a novel classification approach of the Targeted Ensemble Machine Classify Model (TEMCM) to enable dynamically combining a suitable model in a two-phase detection process. The final evaluation result shows the proposed model can archive better performance.