Convolutional Neural Network Committees for Melanoma Classification with Classical And Expert Knowledge Based Image Transforms Data Augmentation

Abstract

Skin cancer is a major public health problem, as is the most common type of cancer and represents more than half of cancer diagnoses worldwide. Early detection influences the outcome of the disease and motivates our work. We investigate the composition of CNN committees and data augmentation for the the ISBI 2017 Melanoma Classification Challenge (named Skin Lesion Analysis towards Melanoma Detection) facing the peculiarities of dealing with such a small, unbalanced, biological database. For that, we explore committees of Convolutional Neural Networks trained over the ISBI challenge training dataset artificially augmented by both classical image processing transforms and image warping guided by specialist knowledge about the lesion axis and improve the final classifier invariance to common melanoma variations.