Journal of Advanced Research in Applied Artificial Intelligence and Neural Network

Volume 5, Issue 1&2 - 2018, Pg. No. 1-5

Peer Reviewed Journal
Research Article

Convolution Neural Network for Feature

Extraction in Skin Disease Detection
Seema Kolkur1, Dhananjay Kalbande2, Vidya Kharkar3
Asst. Prof. Department of Computer Engg, Thadomal Shahani Engg, College Bandra, Mumbai, India.
1

Dean (Industry Relations), Department of Computer Engg, Sardar Patel Institute of Tech, Andheri, Mumbai, India.
2

3
Professor, Department of Skin and VD., Seth G.S.M.C & K.E.M Hosp. Parel, Mumbai-400012, India.

Abstract
Skin Diseases are becoming very common now days. Number of people suffering from skin diseases
is increasing rapidly. Human judgment on diagnosis of skin diseases is sometimes subjective and not
reproducible. To achieve more reliable and objective accuracy computer aided diagnosis may be used.
With advancement in medical imaging, image based classification is been increasingly used for disease
detection in medical field. Feature engineering is very important for any classifier to achieve maximum
results. Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) can learn features on its own reducing total time required for
development of such systems and at the same time increasing level of accuracy. We acquired more than
850 original images for two skin diseases from department of Skin and VD, KEM Hospital, Mumbai. We
have used CNN for feature extraction from input images of two skin diseases. These features are fed to
Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classification. The results indicate CNN can be feasibly used of feature
extraction in skin disease detection.

Categories and Subject Descriptors

I.5.2 [Pattern Recognition]: Design Methodology–classifier design and evaluation.

General Terms

Machine learning, Classification, Feature Extraction.

Keywords: Deep Learning, Convolution Neural Network

Introduction With the advancement in the field of computer technology

Skin diseases are very common in everyday life of many
across the world. In India, dermatological practices are
not that widespread in all parts. There are very few
dermatologists currently practicing in India [1].Very few
hospitals follow these practices using the advanced
technology. Delayed diagnosis of some of the diseases may
results in increasing the chances of spreading the diseases.
So, it is important to have early detection of skin diseases.
and medical imaging, computer aided disease detection and
diagnosis is becoming a reality. A machine can find some
of details form images which possible a human cannot.
Computers can efficiently read images while humans
are error-prone [2]. Neural Network based classifiers are
widely used for disease detection. Feature extraction is
an important aspect of designing any classifier system.
Accuracy of a classifier depends on feature set used for
classification. Unfortunately, it is equally very tedious and

Corresponding Author: Seema Kolkur, Thadomal Shahani Engg, College Bandra, Mumbai, India.
E-mail Id: kolkur.seema@gmail.com
Orcid Id: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2703-203X
How to cite this article: Kolkur S, Kalbande D, Kharkar V. Convolution Neural Network for Feature Extraction in Skin Disease Detection.
J Adv Res Appl Arti Intel Neural Netw 2018; 4(1&2): 1-5.

Copyright (c) 2018 Journal of Advanced Research in Applied Artificial Intelligence and Neural Network
Kolkur S et al.
J. Adv. Res. Appl. Arti. Intel. Neural Netw. 2018; 5(1&2) 2

time consuming task. CNNs can be a real great help here.

CNN can learn features on their own from given large
database.

Related Work
Skin Disease Detection is a widely researched area in the
field of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. With
current technologies in the field of Medical Imaging it
is easier to acquire good quality multiple images. Many
researchers in past have used images for diagnosis of a
disease besides numbers and text. Skin Disease Detection
is basically a classification task. Binary Classification is used
to detect presence or absence of a disease in given image.
Different types of features are used by researchers forsuch
classification systems,Color Features, Texture Features,
Dermoscopic Features and Fractal Features being commonly
used. Figure 1.Methodology of Proposed Work

Texture Features like contrast, correlation, energy, intensity

Data Collection
and homogeneity are extensively used in detection of We have collected our dataset of images for two skin
diseases like psoriasis and skin cancer [3-8]. [9] used fractal diseases mainly Lichen Planus and Vitiligo from the
features for skin cancer detection. Authors in [10-12] department of Skin and VD from KEM Hospital,Parel
used dermoscopic features Area, Border, Color, Diameter Mumbai. Table 1 shows image dataset statistics.
(ABCD) of a skin lesion for detection of skin cancer. Color
Table 1.Dataset Description
features mean like mean color (µc), standard deviation
(σc) and skewness of color are used for psoriasis and skin Sr. No. Disease / No of Training Testing Total
cancer detection[2,5,13]. In most of these disease detection Samples
systems SVM and neural networks with backpropagation 1 Lichen Planus 394 23 417
are used as classifiers.
2 Vitiligo 327 15 342
In recent years, CNN has been used in image recognition. Total No. of 857
Variants of CNN models have been increasingly achieving Images
better performance in different fields. Authors in [14]
and [15] have used CNN for multistage feature extraction Image Preprocessing
for classifying digits in house numbers and music genre
classification respectively. [16] showed that Random Forest Following preprocessing techniques are applied to all the
and SVM can be used with features extracted from CNN images collected.
to yield better a prediction accuracy compared to the
original CNN. Even if the CNN is not optimal (not fully • Cropping: Every image is manually cropped to
trained or overfits), can still extract good features that gives concentrate on diseased body area. Cropping of images
competitive prediction accuracy. [17-18] have implemented is very important as size of images is very large.
efficient CNN architectures to detect diabetic retinopathy

Methodology
Fig. 1 shows general methodology of the proposed system.
The system can be broadly categorized into data collection,
preprocessing, feature extraction and classification
modules. Figure 2.Image before and after cropping
 Kolkur S et al.
3 J. Adv. Res. Appl. Arti. Intel. Neural Netw. 2018; 5(1&2)

• Resizing: All the cropped images are saved as 64*64 Classification

pixels for maintaining uniformity in dimensions.
Feature Extraction by CNN
Convolution Neural networks (CNN) are used for extracting
features from images. CNN are biologically-inspired variants
of MLPs. A CNN consists of an input and an output layer,
as well as multiple hidden layers. The hidden layers of a
CNN typically consist of convolutional layers, pooling layers,
fully connected layers and normalization layers. Output of
every layer acts as an input to next layer. Fig. 2 shows a
typical CNN architecture [19].
Convolution layer preserves the spatial relationship between
pixels by learning image features using small squares of
input data[20]. A feature map from convolution layer is
obtained by sliding a filter over an input image. CNN learns
the values of these filters on its own during the training
process. Pooling also called as downsampling reduces the
dimensionality of each feature map but retains the most
important information. The Fully Connected layer is like
a traditional Multi Layer Perceptron where every neuron
in the previous layer is connected to every neuron on the
next layer. Convolution and pooling layers act as feature
extractors while fully connected layer works as classifier.
For image classification, features extracted from CNN are
passed to SVM for further classification. SVM classifier gives
probability of an input image being one of the two diseases.
Results
The image dataset was divided in training and testing
dataset as shown in table 1. CNN model was trained to
fit to training data. We extracted activations from dense
layer before output layer. These activations are treated
as features and were fed as an input to SVM. SVM acts
as classifier and classifies output probability of every test
record being classified as either lichen planus or vitiligo.
Table 3.Confusion Matrix
Predicted
Lichen Planus Vitiligo
True Lichen Planus 21 2
Vitiligo 3 12
Normally performance of a classifier is measured in terms
of precision and recall. Precision and recall for class Lichen
Planus is calculated as below.

Figure 3.Typical CNN Architecture Similarly, precision and recall for class vitiligo is calculated.
Table 2 describes architecture of our network. We have used For clinical performance of a classifier sensitivity also called
two convolution layers, two maxpooling and two dropout as True Positive Rate, specificity called True Negative Rate
layers and one dense layer. Input is 64x64 RGB image and and accuracy are also considered as performance measures.
output layer has two units representing two skin diseases. These measures are calculated using equations 1,2,3.
Both convlutional layers 1 and 2 use 32 filters of 5x5 size
with maxpooling of size 2x2. (1)
Table 2.CNN Layer Description
Sr. No. Layer Name Size (2)
0 input 3x64x64
1 conv2d1 32x60x60 (3)
2 maxpool1 32x58x58
Figure 4.Performance Metrics
3 conv2d2 32x54x54
4 maxpool2 32x52x52 precision recall f1-score support

5 dropout1 32x52x52 Lichen Planus 0.88 0.91 0.89 23

6 Dense 256 Vitiligo 0.86 0.80 0.83 15

7 dropout2 256 avg / total 0.87 0.87 0.87 38

8 Output 02
Kolkur S et al.
J. Adv. Res. Appl. Arti. Intel. Neural Netw. 2018; 5(1&2)
As can be seen from table 3 and 4 accuracy, Specificity and
Sensitivity of classifier is 87%, 80% and 91% respectively.
Fig.4 shows 32 filters used in first convolutional layer.
Figure 4.32 features of size 5X5 from first layer
Discussion
Deep learning and CNN is used in many computer aided
diagnosis systems which are based on medical image
analysis. Below, we summarize some of the works involving
CNN for feature extraction in medical applications.
In [21] authors proposed a system to classify Human
Epithelial-2 (HEp-2) cell images into 6 staining pattern
classes. They applied transfer learning on a pre-trained
deep CNN (MatConvNet) to extract the generic features.
Then most relevant features for classification were selected
by feature selection. They reported accuracy of 77.1% on
ICPR2012 cell dataset with 1457 images.
[22] used ensemble of multiple fine-tuned CNNs (AlexNet
and GoogLeNet) for feature extraction on ImageCLEF 2016
medical image public dataset with 6776 training images, and
4166 test images and 30 classes with accuracy of 82.48%
[23] evaluates CNN performance on two different computer-
aided diagnosis applications: thoracoabdominal lymph
node detection and interstitial lung disease classification
with transfer learning.
To the best of our knowledge, no work on feature extraction
from skin disease images using CNN is carried out till
date. Most of these works, use pretrained models for
feature extraction on a publicly available dataset. Major
contribution of our work lies in collection of primary
data and training a new network from scratch feature for
extraction. Our system can be used as preprocessing tool
for extracting features from a large set of input images
before any classification algorithm.
Conclusion
We have used convolution network for feature extraction
from skin disease images. The extracted features are then
given as input to SVM classifier. The overall accuracy of
4
classification in 91% which shows CNN can successfully
be used for the stated purpose. Major advantage of a
system is the saving of time and effort involved in feature
engineering. CNNs learn features on their own.
The accuracy can further be improved by adding more
number of images and/or by adding more number of layers
in CNN architecture. By adding two drop-out layers we
make sure the network does not overfit. This system can
be further extracted to classifying multiple skin diseases.
Preprocessing of images is very important task. Currently,
we manually cropped input images. This process can be
automated by using some image processing techniques
like object localization and segmentation.
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Date of Submission: 2018-04-17
Date of Acceptance: 2018-05-03