A machine learning framework for skin cancer classification using texture descriptors

Abstract

Skin cancer remains a critical health and economic concern worldwide. Timely and accurate diagnosis is crucial for improving mortality rate of patients. Although automated machine learning (ML) models assist doctors in clinical assessment of skin cancer from dermoscopic images, their performance often suffers from extreme class imbalance, as benign image samples greatly exceed malignant ones. This leads to false detection and delayed diagnosis of skin cancer. To overcome this issue, the study proposes an efficient and lightweight geometric transformation (GT)–augmented support vector machine (SVM) framework for early diagnosis of skin cancer. It effectively addresses the class imbalance issues present in the datasets and improves the detection of positive cases. The novel pipeline integrates preprocessing, morphology preserving GT, rotation-invariant texture feature extraction, feature validation, and feature scaling for performing binary classification using an optimized SVM framework. This framework provides balanced and accurate lesion classification even if image samples are insufficient. Experimental results have successfully achieved a true positive rate (TPR) of 93% on PH2 and 81.1% on International Skin Imaging Collaboration 2016 (ISIC-2016) dataset, which is better than conventional ML models. These findings prove that proposed GT-SVM framework is a lightweight, interpretable, and computationally efficient approach for early skin cancer diagnosis. Future developments shall explore multi-class lesion classification, validation across diverse clinical datasets, and hybrid feature fusion.