2604003603
  • Open Access
  • Article

A Multi-View Ensemble-Based Weakly Supervised Model for Skin Lesion Images Diagnosis in Dermoscopic Images

  • Qi Han,   
  • Hong Zhang *,   
  • Tengfei Weng,   
  • Yuan Tian,   
  • Zhong Li,   
  • Yadong Lan,   
  • Yuhui Lin,   
  • Shaoshun Yi,   
  • Yutong Wu,   
  • Yangjun Pei

Received: 15 Oct 2025 | Revised: 14 Mar 2026 | Accepted: 07 Apr 2026 | Published: 26 Jun 2026

Abstract

Skin cancer has become one of the most common causes of death, and accurate diagnosis of skin lesions is essential for early detection of melanoma. Beyond traditional approaches, computer-aided diagnosis is increasingly applied to cancer detection. A key benefit is that it removes the potential for human error. However, existing methods are unable to achieve quite high accuracy due to noise (such as hair, ink dots, scales, etc.) and the small inter-class and large intra-class differences in skin images. Therefore, a multi-view ensemble-based weakly supervised model for skin lesion image diagnosis in dermoscopy is proposed. In this method, a weakly supervised multi-view(WSM) module is proposed to deal with noise in data images. We propose a multi-scale feature fusion (MFF) module to address the challenge of small inter-class variance and large intra-class variance in skin disease images. The model can integrate features of multiple basic models well, capture information of different scales, and explore and utilize the advantages of different features.  We conducted a series of experiments in the open dataset HAM10000. The experimental results show that the performance of the proposed model is superior to that of other models, with an accuracy of 95.90%. In conclusion, our model solves the problems of noise and small inter-class and large intra-class differences in skin images well, and achieves advanced performance in skin disease image recognition.

References 

  • 1.

    Siegel, R.L.; Kratzer, T.B.; Giaquinto, A.N.; et al. Cancer Statistics, 2025. CA Cancer J. Clin. 2025, 75, 10.

  • 2.

    Mangione, C.M.; Barry, M.J.; Nicholson, W.K.; et al. Screening for Skin Cancer: US Preventive Services Task Force Recommendation Statement. JAMA 2023, 329, 1290–1295.

  • 3.

    Hernndez-Prez, C.; Podlipnik, S.; Ficapal, J.; et al. Comparative analysis and interpretability of survival models for melanoma prognosis. Comput. Biol. Med. 2025, 190, 110027.

  • 4.

    Jensen, J.D.; Elewski, B.E. The ABCDEF Rule: Combining the “ABCDE Rule” and the “Ugly Duckling Sign” in an Effort to Improve Patient Self-Screening Examinations. J. Clin. Aesthetic Dermatol. 2015, 8, 15.

  • 5.

    Ravikumar, G.; Satpathy, S.K. Innovative Computer-Aided Techniques for Early Detection of Melanoma using Dermoscopic Image Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2025 International Conference on Electronics and Renewable Systems (ICEARS), Tuticorin, India, 11–13 February 2025; pp. 1565–1571.

  • 6.

    Bhatt, H.; Shah, V.; Shah, K.; et al. State-of-the-Art Machine Learning Techniques for Melanoma Skin Cancer Detection and Classification: A Comprehensive Review. Intell. Med. 2023, 3, 180–190.

  • 7.

    Ye, Z.; Zhang, D.; Zhao, Y.; et al. Deep Learning Algorithms for Melanoma Detection Using Dermoscopic Images: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Artif. Intell. Med. 2024, 155, 102934.

  • 8.

    Gharawi, A.; Alahmadi, M.D.; Ramaswamy, L. Self-Supervised Skin Lesion Segmentation: An Annotation-Free Approach. Mathematics 2023, 11, 3805.

  • 9.

    Wang, L.; Zhang, L.; Shu, X.; et al. Intra-Class Consistency and Inter-Class Discrimination Feature Learning for Automatic Skin Lesion Classification. Med. Image Anal. 2023, 85, 102746.

  • 10.

    Cheng, J.; Tian, S.; Yu, L.; et al. ResGANet: Residual Group Attention Network for Medical Image Classification and Segmentation. Med. Image Anal. 2022, 76, 102313.

  • 11.

    Zhang, H.; Li, Z.; Zhao, H.; et al. Attentive Octave Convolutional Capsule Network for Medical Image Classification. Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 2634.

  • 12.

    Selvan, V. Transforming Skin Cancer Diagnosis: A Deep Learning Approach with the Ham10000 Dataset. Cancer Investig. 2024, 42, 801–814.

  • 13.

    Abhiram, A.; Anzar, S.; Panthakkan, A. DeepSkinNet: A Deep Learning Model for Skin Cancer Detection. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Signal Processing and Information Security (ICSPIS), Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 7–8 December 2022; pp. 97–102.

  • 14.

    Yan, S.; Yu, Z.; Primiero, C.; et al. A Multimodal Vision Foundation Model for Clinical Dermatology. Nat. Med. 2025, 31, 2691–2702.

  • 15.

    Wang, Y.; Yu, T.; Cai, J.; et al. Integrating Clinical Knowledge Graphs and Gradient-Based Neural Systems for Enhanced Melanoma Diagnosis via the Seven-Point Checklist. IEEE Trans. Neural Netw. Learn. Syst. 2025, 37, 37–51.

  • 16.

    Zhou, J.; He, X.; Sun, L.; et al. Pre-Trained Multimodal Large Language Model Enhances Dermatological Diagnosis Using SkinGPT-4. Nat. Commun. 2024, 15, 5649.

  • 17.

    Wang, Y.; Zheng, Y.; Yue, C.; et al. GloW-VSNet: A Scribble-Based Weakly Supervised Framework for Global-View Vitiligo Lesion Segmentation. Med. Image Anal. 2025, 109, 103920.

  • 18.

    Wang, H.; Ahn, E.; Bi, L.; et al. Self-Supervised Multi-Modality Learning for Multi-Label Skin Lesion Classification. Comput. Methods Programs Biomed. 2025, 265, 108729.

  • 19.

    Zhao, R.; Chen, X.; Chen, Z.; et al. Diagnosing Glaucoma on Imbalanced Data with Self-Ensemble Dual-Curriculum Learning. Med. Image Anal. 2022, 75, 102295.

  • 20.

    Akram, T.; Khan, M.A.; Sharif, M.; et al. Skin Lesion Segmentation and Recognition Using Multichannel Saliency Estimation and M-SVM on Selected Serially Fused Features. J. Ambient. Intell. Humaniz. Comput. 2024, 15, 1083–1102.

  • 21.

    Rahman, M.M.; Al Mahim, H.; Jeba, J.I.; et al. Deep Learning for Skin Cancer Detection: Multi-Class Lesion Classification Using CNN Architecture. In Proceedings of the 2025 2nd International Conference on Next-Generation Computing, IoT and Machine Learning (NCIM), Gazipur, Bangladesh, 27–28 June 2025.

  • 22.

    Rana, M.; Bhushan, M. Machine Learning and Deep Learning Approach for Medical Image Analysis: Diagnosis to Detection. Multimed. Tools Appl. 2023, 82, 26731–26769.

  • 23.

    Li, J.; Shi, H.; Chen, W.; et al. Semi-Supervised Detection Model Based on Adaptive Ensemble Learning for Medical Images. IEEE Trans. Neural Netw. Learn. Syst. 2023, 36, 237–248.

  • 24.

    Buddenkotte, T.; Sanchez, L.E.; Crispin-Ortuzar, M.; et al. Calibrating Ensembles for Scalable Uncertainty Quantification in Deep Learning-Based Medical Image Segmentation. Comput. Biol. Med. 2023, 163, 107096.

  • 25.

    Chen, Y.; Li, D.; Zhang, X.; et al. Computer Aided Diagnosis of Thyroid Nodules Based on the Devised Small-Datasets Multi-View Ensemble Learning. Med. Image Anal. 2021, 67, 101819.

  • 26.

    Zanddizari, H.; Nguyen, N.; Zeinali, B.; et al. A New Preprocessing Approach to Improve the Performance of CNN-Based Skin Lesion Classification. Med. Biol. Eng. Comput. 2021, 59, 1123–1131.

  • 27.

    Bogacki, P.; Dziech, A. Effective Deep Learning Approach to Denoise Optical Coherence Tomography Images Using BM3D-Based Preprocessing of the Training Data Including Both Healthy and Pathological Cases. IEEE Access 2023, 11, 65395–65406.

  • 28.

    Caseneuve, G.; Valova, I.; LeBlanc, N.; et al. Chest X-Ray Image Preprocessing for Disease Classification. Procedia Comput. Sci. 2021, 192, 658–665.

  • 29.

    Zhang, W.; Lu, F.; Zhao, W.; et al. ACCPG-Net: A Skin Lesion Segmentation Network with Adaptive Channel-Context- Aware Pyramid Attention and Global Feature Fusion. Comput. Biol. Med. 2023, 154, 106580.

  • 30.

    Zhang, Y.; Xie, F.; Chen, J. Tformer: A Throughout Fusion Transformer for Multi-Modal Skin Lesion Diagnosis. Comput. Biol. Med. 2023, 157, 106712.

  • 31.

    Yang, Y.; Xie, F.; Zhang, H.; et al. Skin Lesion Classification Based on Two-Modal Images Using a Multi-Scale Fully-Shared Fusion Network. Comput. Methods Programs Biomed. 2023, 229, 107315.

  • 32.

    Shao, D.; Ren, L.; Ma, L. MSF-Net: A Lightweight Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Network for Skin Lesion Segmentation. Biomedicines 2023, 11, 1733.

  • 33.

    Ding, Y.; Ma, Z.; Wen, S.; et al. AP-CNN: Weakly Supervised Attention Pyramid Convolutional Neural Network for Fine-Grained Visual Classification. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 2021, 30, 2826–2836.

  • 34.

    Novanti, A.I.; Harjoko, A. Modification of C-Grabcut for Segmentation and Classification of Coffee Leaf Diseases in Complex Backgrounds. Int. J. Adv. Comput. Sci. Appl. 2025, 16.

  • 35.

    He, Y.; Wang, A.; Li, S.; et al. Nonfinite-Modality Data Augmentation for Brain Image Registration. Comput. Biol. Med. 2022, 147, 105780.

  • 36.

    Maksimovic, V.; Jaksic, B.; Milosevic, M.; et al. Comparative Analysis of Edge Detection Operators Using a Threshold Estimation Approach on Medical Noisy Images with Different Complexities. Sensors 2024, 25, 87.

  • 37.

    Liu, S.; Deng, W. Very Deep Convolutional Neural Network Based Image Classification Using Small Training Sample Size. In Proceedings of the 3rd IAPR Asian Conference on Pattern Recognition (ACPR), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 3–6 November 2015; pp. 730–734.

  • 38.

    He, K.; Zhang, X.; Ren, S.; et al. Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Las Vegas, NV, USA, 27–30 June 2016; pp. 770–778.

  • 39.

    Liu, Z.; Mao, H.; Wu, C.-Y.; Feichtenhofer, C.; Darrell, T.; Xie, S. A ConvNet for the 2020s. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), New Orleans, LA, USA, 19–24 June 2022; pp. 11976–11986.

  • 40.

    Chollet, F. Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Honolulu, HI, USA, 21–26 July 2017; pp. 1800–1807.

  • 41.

    Ba, J.L.; Kiros, J.R.; Hinton, G.E. Layer Normalization. arXiv 2016, arXiv:1607.06450.

  • 42.

    Hendrycks, D.; Gimpel, K. Gaussian Error Linear Units (Gelus). arXiv 2016, arXiv:1606.08415.

  • 43.

    Lin, T.Y.; Dollr, P.; Girshick, R.; et al. Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Honolulu, HI, USA, 21–26 July 2017; pp. 936–944.

  • 44.

    Britt, N.; Sun, H.j. Spatial Attention in Three-Dimensional Space: A Meta-Analysis for the Near Advantage in Target Detection and Localization. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 2024, 165, 105869.

  • 45.

    Zhuang, C.; Yuan, X.; Gu, L.; et al. Frequency Regulated Channel-Spatial Attention Module for Improved Image Classifica- tion. Expert Syst. Appl. 2025, 260, 125463.

  • 46.

    Tschandl, P.; Rosendahl, C.; Kittler, H. The HAM10000 Dataset, a Large Collection of Multi-Source Dermatoscopic Images of Common Pigmented Skin Lesions. Sci. Data 2018, 5, 180161.

  • 47.

    Li, H.; Wang, M. Very Deep Convolutional Network for Large-Scale Image Recognition. Jisuanji Xitong Yingyong Comput. Syst. Appl. 2021, 30, 330–335.

  • 48.

    Zhang, X.; Zhou, X.; Lin, M.; et al. Shufflenet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Salt Lake City, UT, USA, 18–23 June 2018; pp. 6848–6856.

  • 49.

    Szegedy, C.; Liu, W.; Jia, Y.; et al. Going Deeper with Convolutions. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Boston, MA, USA, 7–12 June 2015.

  • 50.

    Huang, G.; Liu, Z.; Van Der Maaten, L.; et al. Densely Connected Convolutional Networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Honolulu, HI, USA, 21–26 July 2017; pp. 4700–4708.

  • 51.

    Liu, Z.; Lin, Y.; Cao, Y.; et al. Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Montreal, QC, Canada, 10–17 October 2021; pp. 9992–10002.

  • 52.

    Ali, K.; Shaikh, Z.A.; Khan, A.A.; et al. Multiclass Skin Cancer Classification Using EfficientNets—A First Step towards Preventing Skin Cancer. Neurosci. Inform. 2022, 2, 100034.

  • 53.

    Alhudhaif, A.; Almaslukh, B.; Aseeri, A.O.; et al. A Novel Nonlinear Automated Multi-Class Skin Lesion Detection System Using Soft-Attention Based Convolutional Neural Networks. Chaos Solitons Fractals 2023, 170, 113409.

  • 54.

    Alwakid, G.; Gouda, W.; Humayun, M.; et al. Melanoma Detection Using Deep Learning-Based Classifications. Healthcare 2022, 10, 2481.

  • 55.

    Abd Elaziz, M.; Dahou, A.; Mabrouk, A.; et al. An Efficient Artificial Rabbits Optimization Based on Mutation Strategy For Skin Cancer Prediction. Comput. Biol. Med. 2023, 163, 107154–107154.

  • 56.

    Qian, S.; Ren, K.; Zhang, W.; et al. Skin Lesion Classification Using CNNs with Grouping of Multi-Scale Attention and Class-Specific Loss Weighting. Comput. Methods Programs Biomed. 2022, 226, 107166–107166.

Share this article:
How to Cite
Han, Q.; Zhang, H.; Weng, T.; Tian, Y.; Li, Z.; Lan, Y.; Lin, Y.; Yi, S.; Wu, Y.; Pei, Y. A Multi-View Ensemble-Based Weakly Supervised Model for Skin Lesion Images Diagnosis in Dermoscopic Images. Journal of Machine Learning and Information Security 2026, 2 (2), 13. https://doi.org/10.53941/jmlis.2026.100013.
RIS
BibTex
Copyright & License
article copyright Image
Copyright (c) 2026 by the authors.