Impact of fine-tuning parameters of convolutional neural network for skin cancer detection

Melanoma skin cancer is a deadly disease with a high mortality rate. A prompt diagnosis can aid in the treatment of the disease and potentially save the patient’s life. Artificial intelligence methods can help diagnose cancer at a rapid speed. The literature has employed numerous Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) algorithms to detect skin cancer. ML algorithms perform well for small datasets but cannot comprehend larger ones. Conversely, DL algorithms exhibit strong performance on large datasets but misclassify when applied to smaller ones. We conduct extensive experiments using a convolutional neural network (CNN), varying its parameter values to determine which set of values yields the best performance measure. We discovered that adding layers, making each Conv2D layer have multiple filters, and getting rid of dropout layers greatly improves the accuracy of the classifiers, going from 62.5% to 85%. We have also discussed the parameters that have the potential to significantly impact the model’s performance. This shows how powerful it is to fine-tune the parameters of a CNN-based model. These findings can assist researchers in fine-tuning their CNN-based models for use with skin cancer image datasets.