A Lightweight Attention-Based CNN with Saliency-Map Interpretability for Skin Cancer Detection

Skin cancer is among the most prevalent and life threatening forms of cancer worldwide. Early and accurate diagnosis significantly improves patient survival rates. However, manual dermoscopic assessment remains challenging due to visual similarity. This study proposes an Explainable AI-driven framework for automated binary classification of skin lesions using a lightweight attention-based convolutional neural network (CNN-Attention). The model integrates channel attention to focus on informative regions of dermoscopic images while maintaining low computational complexity. A publicly available dataset comprising 2,637 training and 660 test images was used, with balanced class weights. The proposed model achieved 87 percent accuracy with 1.95 million parameters and 7.45 MB of storage, matching the best baseline (MobileNet) while using approximately half as many parameters and half as much storage. ROC AUC and PR AUC scores reached 0.9475 and 0.9430, respectively. Additionally, saliency maps were incorporated as an explainability technique to visualize regions that influence model decisions. Comparative analysis with VGG16,VGG19,ResNet101,and MobileNet demonstrates the proposed models effectiveness in balancing classification results, computational efficiency, and interpretability.