Multi-task Explainable Skin Lesion Classification

Abstract: Skin cancer is one of the deadliest diseases and has a high mortality rate if left untreated. The diagnosis generally starts with visual screening and is followed by a biopsy or histopathological examination. Early detection can aid in lowering mortality rates. Visual screening can be limited by the experience of the doctor. Due to the long tail distribution of dermatological datasets and significant intra-variability between classes, automatic classification utilizing computer-aided methods becomes challenging. In this work, we propose a multitask few-shot-based approach for skin lesions that generalizes well with few labelled data to address the small sample space challenge. The proposed approach comprises a fusion of a segmentation network that acts as an attention module and classification network. The output of the segmentation network helps to focus on the most discriminatory features while making a decision by the classification network. To further enhance the classification performance, we have combined segmentation and classification loss in a weighted manner. We have also included the visualization results that explain the decisions made by the algorithm. Three dermatological datasets are used to evaluate the proposed method thoroughly. We also conducted cross-database experiments to ensure that the proposed approach is generalizable across similar datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed work.