arXiv · 2609.07180
Deep Learning for Biopsy-Free Subtyping of Basal Cell Carcinoma from Dermatoscopic Images
Abstract
Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC) is the most common type of skin cancer, accounting for nearly 80% of skin cancer di- agnoses. Its optimal clinical management is guided by the distinct histopathologic subtype, with aggressive variants requiring more drastic measures. In current clinical practice, subtyping relies on skin biopsies, a procedure both costly and invasive. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary investigation into using deep learning for BCC subtyping, solely from a single dermatoscopic image of the lesion. Given the limited data at our disposal, we employ pre-trained vision transformers (ViTs), a state-of-the-art family of models highly effective for challenging downstream tasks with limited labeled data. Through repeated stratified k-fold cross-validation, we demonstrate that ViTs can achieve superior performance (AUC 0.784 on a dataset of 1271 dermatoscopic images of various BCC subtypes) over standard CNN-based baselines as well as previously-reported human reader perfor- mance, on the task of differentiating aggressive BCCs from other subtype families. These initial findings highlight the potential of combining deep learning and dermatoscopy to provide a biopsy- free alternative for BCC subtyping, thus aiding in improving treatment planning and patient outcomes.
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Alexandros Papadopoulos, Chrysa Episkopou, Ioannis Sarafis, Aimilios Lallas, Anastasios Delopoulos. 2026-09-07. Deep Learning for Biopsy-Free Subtyping of Basal Cell Carcinoma from Dermatoscopic Images. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07180
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