Skin lesions are a severe disease globally.,Early detection of melanoma in dermoscopy images significantly increases the survival rate.,However, the accurate recognition of melanoma is extremely challenging due to the following reasons: low contrast between lesions and skin, visual similarity between melanoma and non-melanoma lesions, etc.,Hence, reliable automatic detection of skin tumors is very useful to increase the accuracy and efficiency of pathologists.,In this paper, we proposed two deep learning methods to address three main tasks emerging in the area of skin lesion image processing, i.e., lesion segmentation (task 1), lesion dermoscopic feature extraction (task 2) and lesion classification (task 3).,A deep learning framework consisting of two fully convolutional residual networks (FCRN) is proposed to simultaneously produce the segmentation result and the coarse classification result.,A lesion index calculation unit (LICU) is developed to refine the coarse classification results by calculating the distance heat-map.,A straight-forward CNN is proposed for the dermoscopic feature extraction task.,The proposed deep learning frameworks were evaluated on the ISIC 2017 dataset.,Experimental results show the promising accuracies of our frameworks, i.e., 0.753 for task 1, 0.848 for task 2 and 0.912 for task 3 were achieved.
BRAF mutations are frequent in cutaneous melanomas and BRAF inhibitors(BRAFi) have shown remarkable clinical efficacy in BRAF mutant melanoma patients.,However, acquired drug resistance can occur rapidly and tumor(s) often progress thereafter.,Various mechanisms of BRAFi resistance have recently been described; however, the mechanism of resistance remains controversial.,In this study we developed BRAFi resistant melanoma cell lines and found that metastasis related EMT properties of BRAFi resistant cells were enhanced significantly.,Upregulation of EGFR was observed in BRAFi resistant cell lines and patient tumors due to demethylation of EGFR regulatory DNA elements.,EGFR induced PI3K/AKT pathway activation in BRAFi resistant cells through epigenetic regulation.,Treatment of EGFR inhibitor was effective in BRAFi resistant melanoma cell lines.,The study demonstrates that EGFR epigenetic activation has important implications in BRAFi resistance in melanoma.