Uma abordagem para o suporte ao diagnóstico de melanoma por imagem via comitês de autoencoders

Abstract

Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer in Brazil, representing about 33% of cases of malignant neoplasms in the country. Melanoma is a type of skin cancer that represents only 3% of cancer cases in the organ, but it is considered the most offensive due to high possibility of metastasis, which is the spread of cancer to other organs. Although melanoma is considered the main fatal skin disease, the introduction of new drugs combined with the detection of the tumor in early stages have contributed to positive prognosis. Through the ABCDEs rule of melanoma, it is possible to identify melanoma by watching some characteristics present in the lesion, however, the identification of melanoma through observation is often a failure, especially when it comes from an inexperienced doctor. Therefore, this work aims to select and use Machine Learning techniques to propose a model that can help dermatologists to identify skin lesions through dermoscopic images, serving as a second opinion to say if it is or it is not melanoma. The proposed model was compared with techniques widely used in the literature for solving complex problems, with the objective of presenting superior performance. Using Precision and Recall, the proposed model proved to be comparable to the others, although it had access to only 0,1% of the dimensions of the image, which indicates that the model worked well on finding the characteristics that discriminate skin lesions.