Second International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Data Science (ICCIDS-2019)
Performance analysis of Convolutional Neural
Network (CNN) based Cancerous Skin Lesion
Detection System
G.S.Jayalakshmi,
Department of Electronics Engineering ,
Madras Institute of Technology,
Anna University,
Chennai, India.
jayalakshmigs.ece@gmail.com
Abstract— This paper focuses on the classification of
dermoscopic images to identify the type of Skin lesion whether
it is benign or malignant. Dermoscopic images provide deep
insight for the analysis of any type of skin lesion. Initially, a
custom Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model is
developed to classify the images for lesion identification. This
model is trained across different train-test split and 30% split
of train data is found to produce better accuracy. To further
improve the classification accuracy a Batch Normalized
Convolutional Neural Network (BN-CNN) is proposed. The
proposed solution consists of 6 layers of convolutional blocks
with batch normalization followed by a fully connected layer
that performs binary classification. The custom CNN model is
similar to the proposed model with the absence of Batch
normalization and presence of Dropout at Fully connected
layer. Experimental results for the proposed model provided
better accuracy of 89.30%. Final work includes analysis of the
proposed model to identify the best tuning parameters.
Keywords—Dermoscopic Image Analysis, Deep Learning,
Convolutional Neural Networks, Batch Normalization, Skin
Lesion, Skin Cancer.
I. INTRODUCTION
Skin lesion refers to any abnormalities on the skin
that may be benign or malignant. Malignant lesions are
cancerous. Early diagnosis and treatment of precancerous
skin lesion prevents the risk of cancer. WHO (World Health
Organization) Statistics states that globally between 2 and 3
million non-melanoma skin cancers and 132,000 melanoma
skin cancers occurs each year [1]. An additional 3,00,000
non-melanoma and 4,500 melanoma skin cancer case will
result due to 10% decrease in ozone levels [1].
Generally, visual inspection of dermoscopic images
requires a well-trained dermatology specialist. Due to
Intraclass variation (colour, texture, shape and location) and
Interclass Visual similarities of skin lesions, the diagnosis of
skin lesion is a challenging task even for an expert
Physician. Hence, Invasive biopsy of the affected lesion is
required for accurate diagnosis by doctors. A Dermoscopic
imaging technique utilizes non-polarized light source and a
magnifying optics to capture and visualize deep skin
structures. Unnecessary biopsies can also be avoided by
analysing dermoscopic images prior to treatment as it
provides a non-invasive method for skin cancer detection.
With the emergence of deep learning approaches, intelligent
medical imaging based diagnosis system can be developed.
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V.Sathiesh Kumar,
Department of Electronics Engineering,
Madras Institute of Technology,
Anna University,
Chennai, India.
sathieshkumar@annauniv.edu
Deep learning technique allows the monitoring of the lesion
automatically instead of frequent regular visit to
dermatologist. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)
provide efficient classification mechanism across many fine-
grained object categories with highly variable tasks [2].
This paper focuses on Classification of skin lesion
types based on Batch normalized Convolutional neural
networks. Advancement in computational hardware and
availability of open source dermoscopic dataset makes
Neural Networks as an efficient method for image
classification.
II. RELATED WORK
Traditional lesion detection methods rely on hand-
crafted features based on ABCDE rule (Asymmetry, Border,
Color, Dermoscopic structure and Evolving) [3], 3-point
checklist [4], 7-point checklist [5], Menzies method [6] and
CASH (Color, Architecture, Symmetry, and Homogeneity)
[7]. Numerous research works has been carried out to
identify the skin lesion. These methods include hand-crafted
feature extraction methods, conventional machine learning
algorithms and deep learning techniques.
• Lequan Yu et al. [8] proposed fully convolutional neural
network for segmentation and deep residual network for
classification. To cope with the degradation and over-
fitting problems as the network goes deeper residual
learning techniques were utilised [8]. Segmentation was
required due to limited amount of dataset around 1200
images. Though 85.5% accuracy was achieved using
residual technique and fully convolutional network,
computational complexity is greatly increased.
• Arkadiusz Kwasigroch et al. [9] focused their research
on the application of transfer learning the existing
efficient convolutional neural networks (CNN) which is
a kind of Deep Neural Network (DNN), for automatic
classification of the skin lesions. VGG19, Residual
Networks (ResNet) and the hybrid of VGG19 with the
Support Vector Machine (SVM) [9] are the three main
CNN that were analysed. These CNN architectures were
analysed and validated over the ISIC dataset. Modified
VGG19 provided best performance with an average
accuracy of 81.2% compared to VGG19-SVM and
ResNet50 with 80.7% and 75.55% accuracies
respectively.
 Second International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Data Science (ICCIDS-2019)
• The approach proposed by Muhammad Ali Farooq et al.
[10] utilizes SVM (Support Vector Machine) and ANN
(Artificial Neural Network) classifiers for classification
of skin lesion. ABCD data of the lesion images were
collected based on feature extraction by conventional
machine learning and image processing approaches. The
extracted features were applied to the SVM and ANN
classifiers to identify the level of the skin cancer.
• Kouhei Shimizu et.al [11] introduced task
decomposition strategy wherein separate classifier was
provided for each class. Color, sub-region and texture
related features were extracted by conventional image
processing techniques. The extracted features were
applied to decomposed classifiers in a layered as well as
flattened approach.
• Barata et al. [12] introduced a Bag of Feature (BoF)
framework which uses four colour constancy algorithms
namely Gray World, max-RGB, Shades of Gray and
General Gray World, to normalize the the color
dermoscopy images. 1D RGB histogram features are
used to classify the images for melanoma detection.
Maximum accuracy of 79.2% was achieved on PH2
dataset using Shades of Gray algorithm.
Based on the extensive literature survey, it has
been identified that further improvement in skin lesion
detection can be achieved. In this paper, batch
normalization in CNN layers are carried out to improve
the accuracy rate in skin lesion identification.
III. METHODOLOGY
The overall workflow is described in the Fig.1
which involves preprocessing of the images followed by
training and testing the dataset for prediction based on
binary classification.
Fig.1 The overall workflow for skin lesion classification
A. Dataset Preparation
The skin lesion dataset includes dermoscopic lesion
images from International Skin Imaging Collaboration
(ISIC) archive [13]. ISIC archive is an open source public
access database of standard clinical and dermoscopic images
provided especially for testing and validating models for
skin cancer identification. The database contained over
13,000 clinical as well as dermoscopic Skin images labeled
as benign, malignant and unknown types. Each image in the
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database was provided with the associated clinical metadata
in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) file format that
contained diagnostic information screened and tested by
expert specialists.
The images from the database are sorted to benign
and malignant classes based on the metadata provided. The
database contained uneven number of benign and malignant
images. Equal number of images from each class is
considered for unbiased classification. The shuffled dataset
of 2400 images from the database is then split for training
and testing subset.1200 benign and 1200 malignant images
are chosen for analyzing the proposed CNN architecture.
Sample images from the dataset are shown in Fig 2.
(a) Benign (b) Malignant
Fig.2 Sample images from the dataset [13]
B. Pre-processing of Dataset
Lesion type from each class was sorted by parsing
the response of diagnostic metadata in JSON description file
format with corresponding image file. The data is resized
and normalized. Images are resized to 400 x 400 pixels by
maintaining the aspect ratio to feed into the architecture.
Anti-aliasing filtering technique is exploited to avoid the
pixel intensity distortion while resizing the images. Images
are normalized by dividing each RGB dimension of input
image pixel array by 255. Thus scaling of the pixel values is
between the uniform range of 0 to 1.
C. Convolutional Neural Network
CNN architecture is similar to regular neural nets
with input layer, hidden layer and an output layer. The input
to the neurons in deep neural networks is arranged in three
dimensions: (width, height, depth). CNN layers are formed
of neurons with different activation functions. The hidden
layers in CNN architecture is formed by a stack of
convolutional blocks that contains a series of convolutional
layer, nonlinear activation layer and a pooling layer. The
output layer is generally a fully connected dense layer that
acts as a classifier for prediction.
The hidden layers provide feature extraction, as the
input and output of convolutional layers are sets of 2D
matrices called feature maps [9]. For an input feature map ,
with filter of kernel/weight matrix and bias , the output
feature map is calculated by convolution operation of
weight matrix over the input feature as follows [14],
--- (1)
 Second International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Data Science (ICCIDS-2019)
The spatial value of an output feature map is computed regularization but with more rapid learning rates. Thus, BN-
based on volume size (W) of the input image to the CNN eliminates the need of dropout at fully connected layer.
convolutional layer , Filter size (F) , amount of Zero
Padding (P) and Stride Size (S). The output feature map size F. Implementation aspects
[15] of each convolution layer is given by, Neural network architecture is implemented using
Keras [18], a framework for deep learning in Python. A layer
--- (2) of abstraction is provided by Keras on top of Tensor flow
[19], which provides a framework for neural network to
D. Batch Normalization create deep learning models. Keras contains open source
While training a deep convolutional neural network python libraries for neural network thus allowing modularity
the input distribution of each layer changes due to the and extensibility for creating deep learning models. Using
python environment allows the user to utilize additional
changes in parameters from previous layer as a result of
Python dependencies like SciPy [20], PIL [21] and SciKit
convolution. This phenomenon is known as internal
learn [22].
covariant shift. The inputs are parameterized by varying
weights. This fluctuation of intermediate layer inputs affects
the learning rate of the model.
Batch normalization (BN) technique proposed by
loffe et al. [16] overcomes internal covariant shift with
adaptive reparametrization. BN updates all the layers
simultaneously along with layer independent training. This
improves performance and stability. Nonlinear transform
applied to each activation fixes the means and variances of
layer inputs. The output activation of each layer is
normalized with zero mean and unit variance. The mean and
variance are estimated after mini-batches rather than over
the entire training set. Consider a mini-batch B = { }
with dimension n and activation x. The mean and
variances of the mini batch are given by
--- (3)

--- (4)
Normalized output of a layer is given by the following
expression,

--- (5)
Here, represents numerical stability constant added to mini
batch variance.The scaled and shifted representation of xˆ is
given by the following expression with learnable parameters
and as,
--- (6)
The parameters and are learned per feature map rather
than per activation in a CNN architecture.

E. Proposed Solution
Deep learning method allows for automatic feature
extraction and improved classification even with very little
dataset [17]. Convolutional neural network (CNN/ConvNet)
architecture is chosen and implemented as Custom CNN
shown in Fig.3 (a). Custom CNN architecture consists of five (a)
convolutional blocks with increasing order of filter. This
architecture is further developed to a Batch normalized CNN
(b)
(BN-CNN) as shown in Fig.3(b) to improve the performance.
BN-CNN architecture is constructed from custom CNN with Fig.3 Network architectures (a) Custom CNN (b) BN-CNN
increased depth of six batch normalized convolutional blocks
with increasing order of filters. The difference between the IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
two architecture is the addition of batch normalization after
each convolutional layer in BN-CNN. The fully connected The neural network model is trained and tested with the
layer of custom CNN contains dropout which introduces specified dataset with binary cross entropy as the loss
nonlinear distortion as it discards certain samples for function. ReLU activation function [23] classification at the
regularization. Batch normalization provides equivalent output node and the performance metrics such as accuracy,

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 Second International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Data Science (ICCIDS-2019)
precision, recall and F-score were calculated [8]. The
average measures of the performance metrics are provided
for analysis.
A. Train – Test Split (Custom CNN)
The custom CNN model is trained and tested with
ReLu activation and adam optimizer and the model accuracy
is evaluated for 10%, 20 % and 30% split of test data from
the overall dataset of 2400 images. Table.1 depicts that 30%
split produced efficient result.
C. Optimizer Analysis
The proposed model is analysed with different
optimizers namely sgd, adagrad, Rmsprop, adam adaddelta,
adamax and nadam [24]. From Fig.5 it is observed that
adaptive moment based optimizers produced better accuracy
with reduced loss compared to Rmsprop and sgd. Adam
optimizer gains the highest accuracy of 87.77% with
minimal loss of 0.27. Adam attained this global minimum
for the default learning rate of 0.001.

TABLE.1 ACCURACY AND LOSS FOR CUSTOM CNN WITH DIFFERENT TEST
DATA SPLIT APPROACHES

DATA SPLIT AVERAGE LOSS

ACCURACY
Split 20% 0.7395 0.4908
Split 25% 0.7833 0.4559
Split 30% 0.8583 0.3067

B. Analysis of BN – CNN
The best data split of 30% is considered and the
batch normalized CNN model is trained and tested for three
different cases with respect to dropout. Dropout is a
regularization technique that ignores certain neurons n
during training and reduces the activation by a factor of n
Fig.5 Comparison of various optimizers based on average accuracy and loss.
(dropout rate) during testing.
D. Learning Rate analysis
Learning rate is an optimization parameter that
tends to minimize the loss function thereby reduces the
model’s error. The adam optimizer is analysed for different
learning rates 10 % above and below the default learning
rate of 0.001. Improved accuracy of 89.3% with a loss factor
of 0.2633 is achieved at the learning rate of 0.0001 as shown
in Table.2. It is also observed that the loss tends to increase
while further increasing or decreasing the learning rate from
the optimal rate of 0.0001.

TABLE.2 PERFORMANCE METRICS FOR DIFFERENT LEARNING RATES OF

ADAM OPTIMIZER AT 10 EPOCH WITH BATCH SIZE 32

LEARNING AVERAGE LOSS AVERAGE AVERAGE AVERAGE

RATE ACCURACY PRECISION RECALL FSCORE

0.01 0.5 8.0590 0.2500 0.5000 0.3333

0.001 0.8305 0.3924 0.8323 0.8306 0.8303
0.0001 0.8930 0.2633 0.8939 0.8939 0.8939
Fig.4 Analysis of BN_CNN with and without dropout based on 0.00001 0.8625 0.3123 0.8705 0.8625 0.8618
performance metrics.

Dropout with rate 0.25 at each layer alternate to

batch normalization layer produced high loss as more
number of activations at each BN_Conv_Blocks are
ignored. Dropout at fully connected layer improved
accuracy with loss trade off. Fig.4 shows that on analysis of
BN_CNN, the model without dropout produced improved
accuracy of 87.7% with minimal loss of 0.27.Thus
BN_CNN without dropout is chosen as a proposed model
for binary classification of skin lesion.
On comparing the results of custom CNN with BN-
CNN for 30% data split, BN-CNN provided improved
accuracy with reduced losss. Hence, the BN_CNN model is
chosen for further evaluation for improved accuracy by
tuning the two main hyperparameters, optimizers and
learning rate. Fig.6 Epochs Vs Average accuracy and loss.

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 Second International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Data Science (ICCIDS-2019)
V. CONCLUSION
Following the hyper parameter tuning analysis the
The BN-CNN model was trained with binary cross
model is trained for different epochs with the best hyper
entropy loss function and 10 epochs with batch size 32 as
parameters and tested for the performance analysis. Fig.6
parameters. Adam optimizer with 0.0001 learning rate is
shows that the best result was obtained at less iteration of 10
chosen. The ISIC dataset is predicted using the proposed
epoch. With increase in epoch the accuracy tends to remain
BN-CNN model to obtain an average accuracy of 89.3%.
constant and the loss increases gradually and saturates.
Significant improvement in prediction is obtained with BN-
The confusion matrix for the best result is shown in
CNN compared to custom CNN.Thus, it is analyzed that
Fig.7 where class 0 and class 1 represent the malignant and
Batch normalization reduced over fitting and acted as a
benign classes respectively. The confusion matrix interprets
regularization technique providing better performance result
that 312 malignant and 313 benign images were predicted
for the binary classification of dermoscopic skin lesion
correctly out of 360 test images in each class. Fig.8 shows
images. This model can be utilized for further multiclass
examples of prediction results from the test subset.
classification for identifying the diagnosis type of the
detected skin lesion.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank NVIDIA for providing
NVIDIA Titan X GPU under University Research
Programme.

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