Detection of Monkeypox Disease from Human Skin Images with a Hybrid Deep Learning Model

Monkeypox, a virus transmitted from animals to humans, is a DNA virus with two distinct genetic lineages in central and eastern Africa. In addition to zootonic transmission through direct contact with the body fluids and blood of infected animals, monkeypox can also be transmitted from person to person through skin lesions and respiratory secretions of an infected person. Various lesions occur on the skin of infected individuals. This study has developed a hybrid artificial intelligence system to detect monkeypox in skin images. An open source image dataset was used for skin images. This dataset has a multi-class structure consisting of chickenpox, measles, monkeypox and normal classes. The data distribution of the classes in the original dataset is unbalanced. Various data augmentation and data preprocessing operations were applied to overcome this imbalance. After these operations, CSPDarkNet, InceptionV4, MnasNet, MobileNetV3, RepVGG, SE-ResNet and Xception, which are state-of-the-art deep learning models, were used for monkeypox detection. In order to improve the classification results obtained in these models, a unique hybrid deep learning model specific to this study was created by using the two highest-performing deep learning models and the long short-term memory (LSTM) model together. In this hybrid artificial intelligence system developed and proposed for monkeypox detection, test accuracy was 87% and Cohen’s kappa score was 0.8222.