A Hybrid Deep-Learning and Evolutionary Feature-Selection Framework for Skin Lesion Classification: Application to Monkeypox Detection

The recent resurgence of Monkeypox has highlighted the urgent need for fast and accurate diagnostic tools. In this paper, we propose a new framework of hybrid deep learning to combine both DenseNet121 and MobileNetV2 to obtain both rich and supplementary attributes of the skin lesion images. By pooling the outputs of these two models in terms of features, we get the lightweight representation of the images as well as rich representations of the images. To improve the feature set, we use Genetic Algorithm (GA) which is useful in reducing the dimensions and eliminating redundancy. Optimized features are then categorized with the help of the Random Forest model, which has been selected due to its good performance and capacity to work with high-dimensional data. Using two publicly accessible datasets, MSID and MSLD, we tested our approach and obtained remarkable classification accuracies of 92.71% and 97.77%, respectively. These findings highlight the success of combining ensemble learning, evolutionary optimization, and deep learning to achieve accuracy and proper diagnosis of monkeypox through medical images.