  Deep learning techniques have shown their superior performance in
dermatologist clinical inspection. Nevertheless, melanoma diagnosis is still a
challenging task due to the difficulty of incorporating the useful
dermatologist clinical knowledge into the learning process. In this paper, we
propose a novel knowledge-aware deep framework that incorporates some clinical
knowledge into collaborative learning of two important melanoma diagnosis
tasks, i.e., skin lesion segmentation and melanoma recognition. Specifically,
to exploit the knowledge of morphological expressions of the lesion region and
also the periphery region for melanoma identification, a lesion-based pooling
and shape extraction (LPSE) scheme is designed, which transfers the structure
information obtained from skin lesion segmentation into melanoma recognition.
Meanwhile, to pass the skin lesion diagnosis knowledge from melanoma
recognition to skin lesion segmentation, an effective diagnosis guided feature
fusion (DGFF) strategy is designed. Moreover, we propose a recursive mutual
learning mechanism that further promotes the inter-task cooperation, and thus
iteratively improves the joint learning capability of the model for both skin
lesion segmentation and melanoma recognition. Experimental results on two
publicly available skin lesion datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed
method for melanoma analysis.
