Skin Lesion Synthesis and Classification Using an Improved DCGAN Classifier

The prognosis for patients with skin cancer improves with regular screening and checkups. Unfortunately, many people with skin cancer do not receive a diagnosis until the disease has advanced beyond the point of effective therapy. Early detection is critical, and automated diagnostic technologies like dermoscopy, an imaging device that detects skin lesions early in the disease, are a driving factor. The lack of annotated data and class-imbalance datasets makes using automated diagnostic methods challenging for skin lesion classification. In recent years, deep learning models have performed well in medical diagnosis. Unfortunately, such models require a substantial amount of annotated data for training. Applying a data augmentation method based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) to classify skin lesions is a plausible solution by generating synthetic images to address the problem. This article proposes a skin lesion synthesis and classification model based on an Improved Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (DCGAN). The proposed system generates realistic images using several convolutional neural networks, making training easier. Scaling, normalization, sharpening, color transformation, and median filters enhance image details during training. The proposed model uses generator and discriminator networks, global average pooling with 2 × 2 fractional-stride, backpropagation with a constant learning rate of 0.01 instead of 0.0002, and the most effective hyperparameters for optimization to efficiently generate high-quality synthetic skin lesion images. As for the classification, the final layer of the Discriminator is labeled as a classifier for predicting the target class. This study deals with a binary classification predicting two classes—benign and malignant—in the ISIC2017 dataset: accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-score model classification performance. BAS measures classifier accuracy on imbalanced datasets. The DCGAN Classifier model demonstrated superior performance with a notable accuracy of 99.38% and 99% for recall, precision, F1 score, and BAS, outperforming the state-of-the-art deep learning models. These results show that the DCGAN Classifier can generate high-quality skin lesion images and accurately classify them, making it a promising tool for deep learning-based medical image analysis.