AI-driven diagnosis of mpox using deep learning models
Mpox lesions can resemble other dermatological conditions, motivating image-based screening, yet published studies remain difficult to compare owing to differences in dataset construction, augmentation policy, and evaluation design. This study provides a leakage-aware benchmark for binary mpox classification using a unified dataset assembled from MSLD v1.0 and v2.0. Seven pretrained backbones and a weighted ensemble were compared under group-stratified five-fold cross-validation with original-only test evaluation, validation-based threshold selection, and temperature scaling. The weighted ensemble achieved mean accuracy 0.8729, F1-score 0.8334, and AUC 0.9388; ConvNeXt-Tiny was the strongest single model (F1 0.8159, AUC 0.9284). These grouped original-only results are intentionally conservative relative to augmentation-heavy or single-split designs and should be interpreted as deflated but more trustworthy reference values. Post hoc calibration analysis, content-level near-duplicate auditing, and a test-time augmentation ablation are provided to substantiate the methodological claims. The contribution is methodological: a transparent benchmark emphasizing reproducible dataset curation, grouped evaluation, and calibrated comparison, while highlighting the limitations of current public skin-image data. Accordingly, these results should be interpreted as a reproducible reference benchmark rather than a clinically validated diagnostic tool, and external clinical validation remains necessary before deployment.