Abstract
Background: Melanoma, or skin cancer, is a dangerous form of cancer that is the major cause of the demise of thousands of people around the world. Methods: In recent years, deep learning has become more popular for analyzing and detecting these medical issues. In this paper, a hybrid deep learning approach has been proposed based on U-Net for image segmentation, Inception-ResNet-v2 for feature extraction, and the Vision Transformer model with a self-attention mechanism for refining the features for early and accurate diagnosis and classification of skin cancer. Furthermore, in the proposed approach, hyperparameter tuning helps to obtain more accurate and optimized results for image classification. Results: Dermoscopic shots gathered by the worldwide skin imaging collaboration (ISIC2020) challenge dataset are used in the proposed research work and achieved 98.65% accuracy, 99.20% sensitivity, and 98.03% specificity, which outperforms the other existing approaches for skin cancer classification. Furthermore, the HAM10000 dataset is used for ablation studies to compare and validate the performance of the proposed approach. Conclusions: The achieved outcome suggests that the proposed approach would be able to serve as a valuable tool for assisting dermatologists in the early detection of melanoma.