Evidence-Driven Differential Diagnosis of Malignant Melanoma

Naren Akash R. J, Anirudh Kaushik, Jayanthi Sivaswamy

Abstract: We present a modular and multi-level framework for the differential diagnosis of malignant melanoma. Our framework integrates contextual information and evidence at the lesion, patient, and population levels, enabling decision-making at each level. We introduce an anatomic-site aware masked transformer, which effectively models the patient context by considering all lesions in a patient, which can be variable in count, and their site of incidence. Additionally, we incorporate patient metadata via learnable demographics embeddings to capture population statistics. Through extensive experiments, we explore the influence of specific information on the decision-making process and examine the tradeoff in metrics when considering different types of information. Validation results using the SIIM-ISIC 2020 dataset indicate including the lesion context with location and metadata improves specificity by \(17.15\%\) and \(7.14\%\), respectively, while enhancing balanced accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/narenakash/meldd.