A Decision Support System for Melanoma Diagnosis from Dermoscopic Images

Abstract

Innovative technologies in dermatology allow for the early screening of skin cancer, which results in a reduction in the mortality rate and surgical treatments. The diagnosis of melanoma is complex not only because of the number of different lesions but because of the high similarity amongst skin lesions of different nature; hence, human vision and physician experience still play a major role. The adoption of automatic systems would aid clinical assessment and make the diagnosis reproducible by eliminating inter- and intra-observer variabilities. In our paper, we describe a computer-aided system for the early diagnosis of melanoma in dermoscopic images. A soft pre-processing phase is performed so as to avoid the loss of details both in texture, colors, and contours, and color-based image segmentation is later carried out using k-means. Features linked to both geometric properties and color characteristics are used to analyze skin lesions through a support vector machine classifier. The PH2 public database is used for the assessment of the procedure’s sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. A statistical approach is carried out to establish the impact of image quality on performance. The obtained results show remarkable achievements, so our computer-aided approach should be suitable as a Decision Support System for melanoma detection.

Keywords

• pigmented skin lesion
• melanoma
• computer-aided detection and diagnosis (CAD)
• k-means
• support vector machine (SVM)
• skin cancer