Enhancing Trust in AI-Driven Dermatology: CLIP for Explainable Skin Lesion Diagnosis

Abstract

Skin carcinoma is the most common cancer worldwide and costs over $8 billion annually. Early diagnosis is vital for improving melanoma survival rates from 23% to 99%. Deep neural networks show promising results in classifying skin lesions as benign or malignant, but black-box methods are typically not trusted by doctors. In this paper we use the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) model, trained on various skin lesion datasets, to capture meaningful relationships between visual features and related diagnostic terms in an effort to increase explainability. We also use a gradient-based visual explanation method for CLIP, known as Grad-ECLIP, which highlights the critical regions in images linked to specific diagnostic descriptions. This pipeline not only classifies skin lesions and generates corresponding descriptions but also adds a layer of visual explanations.