Unit-Vise: Deep Shallow Unit-Vise Residual Neural Networks With Transition Layer For Expert Level Skin Cancer Classification

Many modern neural network architectures with over parameterized regime have been used for identification of skin cancer. Recent work showed that network, where the hidden units are polynomially smaller in size, showed better performance than overparameterized models. Hence, in this paper, we present multistage unit-vise deep dense residual network with transition and additional supervision blocks that enforces the shorter connections resulting in better feature representation. Unlike ResNet, We divided the network into several stages, and each stage consists of several dense connected residual units that support residual learning with dense connectivity and limited the skip connectivity. Thus, each stage can consider the features from its earlier layers locally as well as less complicated in comparison to its counter network. Evaluation results on ISIC-2018 challenge consisting of 10,015 training images show considerable improvement over other approaches achieving 98.05% accuracy and improving on the best results achieved in the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC-17 and ISIC-18) skin cancer competitions. The code of Unit-vise network is publicly available.