  While skin cancer is the most diagnosed form of cancer in men and women, with
more cases diagnosed each year than all other cancers combined, sufficiently
early diagnosis results in very good prognosis and as such makes early
detection crucial. While radiomics have shown considerable promise as a
powerful diagnostic tool for significantly improving oncological diagnostic
accuracy and efficiency, current radiomics-driven methods have largely rely on
pre-defined, hand-crafted quantitative features, which can greatly limit the
ability to fully characterize unique cancer phenotype that distinguish it from
healthy tissue. Recently, the notion of discovery radiomics was introduced,
where a large amount of custom, quantitative radiomic features are directly
discovered from the wealth of readily available medical imaging data. In this
study, we present a novel discovery radiomics framework for skin cancer
detection, where we leverage novel deep multi-column radiomic sequencers for
high-throughput discovery and extraction of a large amount of custom radiomic
features tailored for characterizing unique skin cancer tissue phenotype. The
discovered radiomic sequencer was tested against 9,152 biopsy-proven clinical
images comprising of different skin cancers such as melanoma and basal cell
carcinoma, and demonstrated sensitivity and specificity of 91% and 75%,
respectively, thus achieving dermatologist-level performance and \break hence
can be a powerful tool for assisting general practitioners and dermatologists
alike in improving the efficiency, consistency, and accuracy of skin cancer
diagnosis.
