ArsenicNet: An efficient way of arsenic skin disease detection using enriched fusion Xception model

Abstract

Arsenic contamination of drinking water is a significant health risk. Countries such as Bangladesh’s rural areas and regions are in the red alert zone because groundwater is the only primary source of drinking. Early detection of arsenic disease is critical for mitigating long-term health issues. However, these approaches are not widely accepted. In this study, we proposed a fusion approach for the detection of arsenic skin disease. The proposed model is a combination of the Xception model with the Inception module in a deep learning architecture named “ArsenicNet.” The model was trained and tested on a publicly available image dataset named “ArsenicSkinImageBD” which contains only 1287 samples and is based on Bangladeshi people. The proposed model achieved the best accuracy through proper experimentation compared to several state-of-the-art deep learning models, including InceptionV3, VGG19, EfficientNetV2B0, ResNet152V2, ViT, and Xception. The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 97.69% and an F1 score of 97.63%, demonstrating superior performance. This research indicates that our proposed model can detect complex patterns in which arsenic skin disease is present, leading to a superior detection performance. Moreover, data augmentation techniques and earlystoping function were used to prevent models overfitting. This study highlights the potential of sophisticated deep learning methodologies to enhance the accuracy of arsenic detection and prevent premature interventions in the diagnosis of arsenic-related illnesses in people. This research contributes to ongoing efforts to develop robust and scalable solutions to monitor and manage arsenic contamination-related health issues. © 2025 Mehedi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.