Deep Learning for Basal Cell Carcinoma Detection for Reflectance Confocal Microscopy. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • Basal cell carcinoma (BCC) is the most common skin cancer, with over 2 million cases diagnosed annually in the United States. Conventionally, BCC is diagnosed by naked eye examination and dermoscopy. Suspicious lesions are either removed or biopsied for histopathological confirmation, thus lowering the specificity of noninvasive BCC diagnosis. Recently, reflectance confocal microscopy, a noninvasive diagnostic technique that can image skin lesions at cellular level resolution, has shown to improve specificity in BCC diagnosis and reduced the number needed to biopsy by 2-3 times. In this study, we developed and evaluated a deep learning-based artificial intelligence model to automatically detect BCC in reflectance confocal microscopy images. The proposed model achieved an area under the curve for the receiver operator characteristic curve of 89.7% (stack level) and 88.3% (lesion level), a performance on par with that of reflectance confocal microscopy experts. Furthermore, the model achieved an area under the curve of 86.1% on a held-out test set from international collaborators, demonstrating the reproducibility and generalizability of the proposed automated diagnostic approach. These results provide a clear indication that the clinical deployment of decision support systems for the detection of BCC in reflectance confocal microscopy images has the potential for optimizing the evaluation and diagnosis of patients with skin cancer.

publication date

  • July 13, 2021

Research

keywords

  • Carcinoma, Basal Cell
  • Deep Learning
  • Skin Neoplasms

Identity

PubMed Central ID

  • PMC9338423

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 85115189912

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1109/EMBC.2019.8856731

PubMed ID

  • 34265329

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 142

issue

  • 1