Skin Lesion Classification by Multi-View Filtered Transfer Learning

Skin cancer is one of the most deadly cancer types with considerable number of patients. Image analysis has largely improved the automated diagnosis accuracy for malignant melanoma and other pigmented skin lesions, compared to unaided visual examination. Recent popular solution for automated skin lesion classification is using deep neural networks, trained from large amounts of professional annotated data, but that largely limits the model’s scalability. This paper exploits transfer learning for skin lesion classification task with the help of labeled data from another domain (source), and proposes a multi-view filtered transfer learning network to strongly represent discriminative information from different image views with reasonable weighing strategy. This method also evaluates the importance for each source images, which can learn useful knowledge with neglecting negative samples from source domain. The extensive skin lesion classification experiments demonstrate our method can effectively solve Melanoma and Seborrheic Keratosis classification tasks with outstanding extensibility, and the discussion of the major components also testifies the improvements of our proposed multi-view filtered transfer learning approach.