Abstract
With the increasing incidence of severe skin diseases, such as skin cancer, endoscopic medical imaging has become urgent for revealing the internal and hidden tissues under the skin. Diagnostic information to help doctors make an accurate diagnosis is provided by endoscopy devices. Nonetheless, most skin diseases have similar features, which make it challenging for dermatologists to diagnose patients accurately. Therefore, machine and deep learning techniques can have a critical role in diagnosing dermatoscopy images and in the accurate early detection of skin diseases. In this study, systems for the early detection of skin lesions were developed. The performance of the machine learning and deep learning was evaluated on two datasets (e.g., the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC 2018) and Pedro Hispano (PH2)). First, the proposed system was based on hybrid features that were extracted by three algorithms: local binary pattern (LBP), gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), and wavelet transform (DWT). Such features were then integrated into a feature vector and classified using artificial neural network (ANN) and feedforward neural network (FFNN) classifiers. The FFNN and ANN classifiers achieved superior results compared to the other methods. Accuracy rates of 95.24% for diagnosing the ISIC 2018 dataset and 97.91% for diagnosing the PH2 dataset were achieved using the FFNN algorithm. Second, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) (e.g., ResNet-50 and AlexNet models) were applied to diagnose skin diseases using the transfer learning method. It was found that the ResNet-50 model fared better than AlexNet. Accuracy rates of 90% for diagnosing the ISIC 2018 dataset and 95.8% for the PH2 dataset were reached using the ResNet-50 model.