Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) Based Skin Cancer Classification: A Deep Learning Approach

Abstract

Skin cancer ranks among the most commonly diagnosed forms of cancer worldwide, with millions of new cases identified annually. Over 2 million cases of non-melanoma skin cancer and approximately 132,000 melanoma cases are reported each year . The study aims is to develop an efficient deep learning model using CNN’s architectures to accurately classify skin lesions as malignant or benign based on dermoscopic images. This study explored the use of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models using AlexNet and ResNet architectures for skin cancer classification. The performance of both models were evaluated based on key metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. AlexNet was trained on 1,200 skin lesion images and validated on 600 images,training spanned 10 epochs. ResNet was similarly trained and validated after 10 epochs. Both architectures were compared under identical conditions (same dataset, pre-processing, optimizer, and hyperparameters). ResNet outperformed AlexNet in all performance metrics of accuracy as  91.00% and 59.00% respectively. This research explored the performance of CNN(ResNet50) and CNN(AlexNet). This validates that deeper architectures with residual connections, batch normalization, and optimized feature extraction are more effective for binary skin cancer classification.