Latent Space Analysis for Melanoma Prevention

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Listone, Ciro, Murano, Aniello
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Listone, Ciro
Murano, Aniello
author_facet Listone, Ciro
Murano, Aniello
contents Melanoma represents a critical health risk due to its aggressive progression and high mortality, underscoring the need for early, interpretable diagnostic tools. While deep learning has advanced in skin lesion classification, most existing models provide only binary outputs, offering limited clinical insight. This work introduces a novel approach that extends beyond classification, enabling interpretable risk modelling through a Conditional Variational Autoencoder. The proposed method learns a structured latent space that captures semantic relationships among lesions, allowing for a nuanced, continuous assessment of morphological differences. An SVM is also trained on this representation effectively differentiating between benign nevi and melanomas, demonstrating strong and consistent performance. More importantly, the learned latent space supports visual and geometric interpretation of malignancy, with the spatial proximity of a lesion to known melanomas serving as a meaningful indicator of risk. This approach bridges predictive performance with clinical applicability, fostering early detection, highlighting ambiguous cases, and enhancing trust in AI-assisted diagnosis through transparent and interpretable decision-making.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_18414
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Latent Space Analysis for Melanoma Prevention
Listone, Ciro
Murano, Aniello
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Melanoma represents a critical health risk due to its aggressive progression and high mortality, underscoring the need for early, interpretable diagnostic tools. While deep learning has advanced in skin lesion classification, most existing models provide only binary outputs, offering limited clinical insight. This work introduces a novel approach that extends beyond classification, enabling interpretable risk modelling through a Conditional Variational Autoencoder. The proposed method learns a structured latent space that captures semantic relationships among lesions, allowing for a nuanced, continuous assessment of morphological differences. An SVM is also trained on this representation effectively differentiating between benign nevi and melanomas, demonstrating strong and consistent performance. More importantly, the learned latent space supports visual and geometric interpretation of malignancy, with the spatial proximity of a lesion to known melanomas serving as a meaningful indicator of risk. This approach bridges predictive performance with clinical applicability, fostering early detection, highlighting ambiguous cases, and enhancing trust in AI-assisted diagnosis through transparent and interpretable decision-making.
title Latent Space Analysis for Melanoma Prevention
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18414