SCDNet: A Deep Learning-Based Framework for the Multiclassification of Skin Cancer Using Dermoscopy Images

Skin cancer is a deadly disease, and its early diagnosis enhances the chances of survival. Deep learning algorithms for skin cancer detection have become popular in recent years. A novel framework based on deep learning is proposed in this study for the multiclassification of skin cancer types such as Melanoma, Melanocytic Nevi, Basal Cell Carcinoma and Benign Keratosis. The proposed model is named as SCDNet which combines Vgg16 with convolutional neural networks (CNN) for the classification of different types of skin cancer. Moreover, the accuracy of the proposed method is also compared with the four state-of-the-art pre-trained classifiers in the medical domain named Resnet 50, Inception v3, AlexNet and Vgg19. The performance of the proposed SCDNet classifier, as well as the four state-of-the-art classifiers, is evaluated using the ISIC 2019 dataset. The accuracy rate of the proposed SDCNet is 96.91% for the multiclassification of skin cancer whereas, the accuracy rates for Resnet 50, Alexnet, Vgg19 and Inception-v3 are 95.21%, 93.14%, 94.25% and 92.54%, respectively. The results showed that the proposed SCDNet performed better than the competing classifiers.