Malignant melanomas are the most deadly type of skin cancer, yet detected early have high chances of successful treatment. In the last twenty years, the interest in automatic recognition and classification of melanoma dynamically increased, partly because of appearing public datasets with dermatoscopic images of skin lesions. Automated computer-aided skin cancer detection in dermatoscopic images is a very challenging task due to uneven sizes of datasets, huge intra-class variation with small interclass variation, and the existence of many artifacts in the images. One of the most recognized methods of melanoma diagnosis is the ABCD method. In the paper, we propose an extended version of this method and an intelligent decision support system based on neural networks that uses its results in the form of hand-crafted features. Automatic determination of the skin features with the ABCD method is difficult due to the large diversity of images of various quality, the existence of hair, different markers and other obstacles. Therefore, it was necessary to apply advanced methods of pre-processing the images. The proposed system is an ensemble of ten neural networks working in parallel, and one network using their results to generate a final decision. This system structure enables to increase the efficiency of its operation by several percentage points compared with a single neural network. The proposed system is trained on over 5000 and tested afterwards on 200 skin moles. The presented system can be used as a decision support system for primary care physicians, as a system capable of self-examination of the skin with a dermatoscope and also as an important tool to improve biopsy decision making.

This study presents an artificial intelligence technique based on ensemble of artificial neural networks for the purposes of analysis and prediction of labour productivity. The study focuses on the development of model that combines several artificial neural networks on the basis of real-life data collected on a construction site for steel reinforcement works. The data includes conditions, characteristics, features of steel reinforcement works and related efficiencies of workers assigned to particular tasks recorded on site. The proposed ensemble based model combines five supervised learning models — five different multilayer perceptron networks, which contribution in the prediction is weighted due to the application of generalised averaging approach. Testing results show that the proposed ensemble based model achieves the satisfactory evaluation criteria for coefficient of correlation (0.989), root-mean-squared error (2.548), mean absolute percentage error (4.65%) and maximum absolute percentage error (8.98%).