Background selection schema on deep learning-based classification of dermatological disease

Skin diseases are one of the most common ailments affecting humans. Artificial intelligence based on deep learning can significantly improve the efficiency of identifying skin disorders and alleviate the scarcity of medical resources. However, the distribution of background information in dermatological datasets is imbalanced, causing generalized deep learning models to perform poorly in skin disease classification. We propose a deep learning schema that combines data preprocessing, data augmentation, and residual networks to study the influence of color-based background selection on a deep model’s capacity to learn foreground lesion subject attributes in a skin disease classification problem. First, clinical photographs are annotated by dermatologists, and then the original background information is masked with unique colors to generate several subsets with distinct background colors. Sample-balanced training and test sets are generated using random over/undersampling and data augmentation techniques. Finally, the deep learning networks are independently trained on diverse subsets of backdrop colors to compare the performance of classifiers based on different background information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that color-based background information significantly affects the classification of skin diseases and that classifiers trained on the green subset achieve state-of-the-art performance for classifying black and red skin lesions. •This study has given us new insights into skin diseases in Asian populations.•This study presents a new method of exploring the skin disease classification.•This study will help improve the accuracy of skin disease classification.