Melanoma skin cancer detection using mask-RCNN with modified GRU model

Introduction: Melanoma Skin Cancer (MSC) is a type of cancer in the human body; therefore, early disease diagnosis is essential for reducing the mortality rate. However, dermoscopic image analysis poses challenges due to factors such as color illumination, light reflections, and the varying sizes and shapes of lesions. To overcome these challenges, an automated framework is proposed in this manuscript.

Methods: Initially, dermoscopic images are acquired from two online benchmark datasets: International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) 2020 and Human against Machine (HAM) 10000. Subsequently, a normalization technique is employed on the dermoscopic images to decrease noise impact, outliers, and variations in the pixels. Furthermore, cancerous regions in the pre-processed images are segmented utilizing the mask-faster Region based Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) model. The mask-RCNN model offers precise pixellevel segmentation by accurately delineating object boundaries. From the partitioned cancerous regions, discriminative feature vectors are extracted by applying three pre-trained CNN models, namely ResNeXt101, Xception, and InceptionV3. These feature vectors are passed into the modified Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) model for MSC classification. In the modified GRU model, a swish-Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation function is incorporated that efficiently stabilizes the learning process with better convergence rate during training.

Results and discussion: The empirical investigation demonstrate that the modified GRU model attained an accuracy of 99.95% and 99.98% on the ISIC 2020 and HAM 10000 datasets, where the obtained results surpass the conventional detection models.