Skin Lesion Analysis By Multi-Target Deep Neural Networks.

Automatic skin lesion analysis involves two critical steps: lesion segmentation and lesion classification. In this work, we propose a novel multi-target deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) to simultaneously tackle the problem of segmentation and classification. Based on U-Net and GoogleNet, a single model is constructed with three different targets of both lesion segmentation and two independent binary lesion classifications (i.e., melanoma detection and seborrheic keratosis identification), aiming to explore the differences and commonalities over different target models. We conduct experiments on dermoscopic images from the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) 2017 Challenge. Results of our multi-target DCNN model demonstrates superiority over single model with one target only (such as U-net or GoogleNet), indicating its learning efficiency and potential for application in automatic skin lesion diagnosis. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first demonstration for a single end-to-end deep neural network model that simultaneously handle both segmentation and classification in the field of skin lesion analysis.