Fuzzy Logic with Deep Learning for Detection of Skin Cancer

Featured Application Deep learning-based diagnosis of a suspicious lesion using a simple handheld device such as smartphone. Awareness and frequency of diagnosis of malignant melanoma will be increased thereafter, increasing the chances of detection of skin cancer at an early stage. Out motivation is to deploy the deep learning algorithm using a smartphone application. Melanoma is the deadliest type of cancerous cell, which is developed when melanocytes, melanin producing cell, starts its uncontrolled growth. If not detected and cured in its situ, it might decrease the chances of survival of patients. The diagnosis of a melanoma lesion is still a challenging task due to its visual similarities with benign lesions. In this paper, a fuzzy logic-based image segmentation along with a modified deep learning model is proposed for skin cancer detection. The highlight of the paper is its dermoscopic image enhancement using pre-processing techniques, infusion of mathematical logics, standard deviation methods, and the L-R fuzzy defuzzification method to enhance the results of segmentation. These pre-processing steps are developed to improve the visibility of lesion by removing artefacts such as hair follicles, dermoscopic scales, etc. Thereafter, the image is enhanced by histogram equalization method, and it is segmented by proposed method prior to performing the detection phase. The modified model employs a deep neural network algorithm, You Look Only Once (YOLO), which is established on the application of Deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) for detection of melanoma lesion from digital and dermoscopic lesion images. The YOLO model is composed of a series of DCNN layers we have added more depth by adding convolutional layer and residual connections. Moreover, we have introduced feature concatenation at different layers which combines multi-scale features. Our experimental results confirm that YOLO provides a better accuracy score and is faster than most of the pre-existing classifiers. The classifier is trained with 2000 and 8695 dermoscopic images from ISIC 2017 and ISIC 2018 datasets, whereas PH2 datasets along with both the previously mentioned datasets are used for testing the proposed algorithm.