A deep analysis on high-resolution dermoscopic image classification

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been broadly employed in dermoscopic image analysis, mainly as a result of the large amount of data gathered by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC). As in many other medical imaging domains, state-of-the-art methods take advantage of architectures developed for other tasks, frequently assuming full transferability between enormous sets of natural images (e.g. ImageNet) and dermoscopic images, which is not always the case. A comprehensive analysis on the effectiveness of state-of-the-art deep learning techniques when applied to dermoscopic image analysis is provided. To achieve this goal, the authors consider several CNNs architectures and analyse how their performance is affected by the size of the network, image resolution, data augmentation process, amount of available data, and model calibration. Moreover, taking advantage of the analysis performed, a novel ensemble method to further increase the classification accuracy is designed. The proposed solution achieved the third best result in the 2019 official ISIC challenge, with an accuracy of 0.593.