Exploring the challenge and value of deep learning in automated skin disease diagnosis

Skin cancer is one of the most prevalent and deadly forms of cancer worldwide, highlighting the critical importance of early detection and diagnosis in improving patient outcomes. Deep learning (DL) has shown significant promise in enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of automated skin disease diagnosis, particularly in detecting and classifying skin lesions. However, several challenges remain for DL-based skin cancer diagnosis, including complex features, image noise, intra-class variation, inter-class similarity, and data imbalance. This review synthesizes recent research and discusses innovative approaches to address these challenges, such as data augmentation, hybrid models, and feature fusion. Furthermore, the review highlights the integration of DL models into clinical workflows, offering insights into the potential of deep learning to revolutionize skin disease diagnosis and improve clinical decision-making. This review uniquely integrates a PRISMA-based methodology with a challenge-oriented taxonomy, providing a systematic and transparent synthesis of recent deep learning advances for skin disease diagnosis. It further highlights emerging directions such as hybrid CNN-Transformer architectures and uncertainty-aware models, emphasizing its contribution to future dermatological AI research.