DSCIMABNet: A novel multi-head attention depthwise separable CNN model for skin cancer detection

Skin cancer is a common type of cancer worldwide. Early diagnosis of skin cancer can reduce the risk of death by increasing treatment success. However, it is challenging for dermatologists or specialists because the symptoms are vague in the early stages and cannot be noticed by the naked eye. This study examines digital diagnostic techniques supported by artificial intelligence, focusing on early skin cancer detection and two methods have been proposed. In the first method, DSCIMABNet deep learning architecture was developed by combining multi-head attention and depthwise separable convolution techniques. This model provides flexibility in learning the dataset's local features, abstract concepts, and long-term relationships. The DSCIMABNet model and modern deep learning models trained on ImageNet are proposed to be combined with the ensemble learning method in the second method. This approach provides a comprehensive feature extraction process that will increase the performance of the classification process with ensemble learning. The proposed approaches are trained and evaluated on the ISIC 2018 dataset with image enhancement applied in preprocessing. In the experimental results, DSCIMABNet achieved 84.28% accuracy, while the proposed hybrid method achieved 99.40% accuracy. Moreover, on the Mendeley dataset (CNN for Melanoma Detection Data), DSCIMABNet achieved 92.58% accuracy, while the hybrid method achieved 99.37% accuracy. This study may significantly contribute to developing new and effective methods for the early diagnosis and treatment of skin cancer.