This project contains the source code of all experiments described in 'Solo or Ensemble? Choosing a CNN Architecture for Melanoma Classification.'

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) deliver exceptional results for computer vision, including medical image analysis. With the growing number of available architectures, picking one over another is far from obvious. Existing art suggests that, when performing transfer learning, the performance of CNN architectures on ImageNet correlates strongly with their performance on target tasks. We evaluate that claim for melanoma classification, over 9 CNNs architectures, in 5 sets of splits created on the ISIC Challenge 2017 dataset, and 3 repeated measures, resulting in 135 models. The correlations we found were, to begin with, much smaller than those reported by existing art, and disappeared altogether when we considered only the top-performing networks: uncontrolled nuisances (i.e., splits and randomness) overcome any of the analyzed factors. Whenever possible, the best approach for melanoma classification is still to create ensembles of multiple models. We compared two choices for selecting which models to ensemble: picking them at random (among a pool of highquality ones) vs. using the validation set to determine which ones to pick first. For small ensembles, we found a slight advantage on the second approach but found that random choice was also competitive. Although our aim in this paper was not to maximize performance, we easily reached AUCs comparable to the first place on the ISIC Challenge 2017.

1. Install OpenCV with pip3 install opencv-python.
2. Run pip3 install -r requirements.txt.

The project uses Sacred to organize the experiments. If you want to monitor the experiments with Telegram (receive a message when the experiments start, finish, or fail), create a file telegram.json at the root of the project:

$ cat telegram.json
{
    "token": "00000000:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX",
    "chat_id": "00000000"
}

To configure the Telegram API, check this.

Register to ISIC 2017: Skin Lesion Analysis Towards Melanoma Detection.

Download data for the three phases of 'Part 3: Lesion Classification' (training, validation, testing.

To make train faster, we resize every image to a maximum width or height of 1024 pixels. This will make augmentation operations (e.g. resizing, random crop) run faster. ImageMagick can do the trick:

cd ISIC-2017_Training_Data
mkdir 1024
convert "*.jpg[1024x>]" -set filename:base "%[base]" "1024/%[filename:base].jpg"

Repeat the same for the validation and test sets.

Put all images (train, validation, test) into the same directory (e.g. ISIC2017_Full). We will use our own splits.

Set the path to ISIC2017_Full:

export ISIC2017_FULL=path/to/ISIC2017_Full

Now, run all experiments:

./experiments/run.sh

python3 create_ensembles.py

This will create three types of ensembles:

1. Average models with same architecture and same split.
2. Average models with different architectures and same split, at random.
3. Average models with different architectures and same split, sorted by validation AUC.

The files will be available at results/ensemble_{1,2,3}.csv.

The code will be available in the next few weeks.

If you use this code, please cite us:

@inproceedings{perez19soloorensemble,
 author    = {Perez, F{\'a}bio and and Avila, Sandra and Valle, Eduardo},
 title     = {Solo or Ensemble? Choosing a CNN Architecture for Melanoma Classification},
 booktitle = {ISIC Skin Image Anaylsis Workshop, 2019 {IEEE} Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW)},
 year      = {2019},
}