Diffusion models applied to skin and oral cancer classification

Abstract: This study investigates the application of diffusion models in medical image classification (DiffMIC), focusing on skin and oral lesions. Utilizing the datasets PAD-UFES-20 for skin cancer and P-NDB-UFES for oral cancer, the diffusion model demonstrated competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art deep learning models like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers. Specifically, for the PAD-UFES-20 dataset, the model achieved a balanced accuracy of 0.6457 for six-class classification and 0.8357 for binary classification (cancer vs. non-cancer). For the P-NDB-UFES dataset, it attained a balanced accuracy of 0.9050. These results suggest that diffusion models are viable models for classifying medical images of skin and oral lesions. In addition, we investigate the robustness of the model trained on PAD-UFES-20 for skin cancer but tested on the clinical images of the HIBA dataset.