Automatic detection of melanoma using broad extraction of features from digital images

Automatic Skin Cancer Detection Using Clinical Images: A Comprehensive Review

Skin cancer has become increasingly common over the past decade, with melanoma being the most aggressive type. Hence, early detection of skin cancer and melanoma is essential in dermatology. Computational methods can be a valuable tool for assisting dermatologists in identifying skin cancer. Most research in machine learning for skin cancer detection has focused on dermoscopy images due to the existence of larger image datasets. However, general practitioners typically do not have access to a dermoscope and must rely on naked-eye examinations or standard clinical images. By using standard, off-the-shelf cameras to detect high-risk moles, machine learning has also proven to be an effective tool. The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of image-processing techniques for skin cancer detection using clinical images. In this study, we evaluate 51 state-of-the-art articles that have used machine learning methods to detect skin cancer over the past decade, focusing on clinical datasets. Even though several studies have been conducted in this field, there are still few publicly available clinical datasets with sufficient data that can be used as a benchmark, especially when compared to the existing dermoscopy databases. In addition, we observed that the available artifact removal approaches are not quite adequate in some cases and may also have a negative impact on the models. Moreover, the majority of the reviewed articles are working with single-lesion images and do not consider typical mole patterns and temporal changes in the lesions of each patient.

Refined Residual Deep Convolutional Network for Skin Lesion Classification

Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer that affects humans and is usually diagnosed by initial clinical screening, which is followed by dermoscopic analysis. Automated classification of skin lesions is still a challenging task because of the high visual similarity between melanoma and benign lesions. This paper proposes a new residual deep convolutional neural network (RDCNN) for skin lesions diagnosis. The proposed neural network is trained and tested using six well-known skin cancer datasets, PH2, DermIS and Quest, MED-NODE, ISIC2016, ISIC2017, and ISIC2018. Three different experiments are carried out to measure the performance of the proposed RDCNN. In the first experiment, the proposed RDCNN is trained and tested using the original dataset images without any pre-processing or segmentation. In the second experiment, the proposed RDCNN is tested using segmented images. Finally, the utilized trained model in the second experiment is saved and reused in the third experiment as a pre-trained model. Then, it is trained again using a different dataset. The proposed RDCNN shows significant high performance and outperforms the existing deep convolutional networks.

Melanoma Detection From Lesion Images Using Optimized Features Selected by Metaheuristic Algorithms

This paper deals with a simple but efficient method for detection of deadly malignant melanoma with optimized hand-crafted feature sets selected by three alternative metaheuristic algorithms, namely Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Simulated Annealing (SA). Total 1898 number of features relating to lesion shapes, colors and textures are extracted from each of the 170 non-dermoscopy camera images of the popular MED-NODE dataset. This large feature set is then optimized and the number of features is reduced to up-to the range of single digit using metaheuristic algorithms as feature selector. Two well-known supervised classifiers, i.e. Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) are used to classify malignant and benign lesions. The best classification accuracy result found by this method is 87.69% with only 7 features selected by PSO using ANN classifier which is far better than the results found in the literature so far.

Bucket of Deep Transfer Learning Features and Classification Models for Melanoma Detection

Malignant melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer and, in recent years, is rapidly growing in terms of the incidence worldwide rate. The most effective approach to targeted treatment is early diagnosis. Deep learning algorithms, specifically convolutional neural networks, represent a methodology for the image analysis and representation. They optimize the features design task, essential for an automatic approach on different types of images, including medical. In this paper, we adopted pretrained deep convolutional neural networks architectures for the image representation with purpose to predict skin lesion melanoma. Firstly, we applied a transfer learning approach to extract image features. Secondly, we adopted the transferred learning features inside an ensemble classification context. Specifically, the framework trains individual classifiers on balanced subspaces and combines the provided predictions through statistical measures. Experimental phase on datasets of skin lesion images is performed and results obtained show the effectiveness of the proposed approach with respect to state-of-the-art competitors.

Artificial Intelligence Applications in Dermatology: Where Do We Stand?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a progressively prevalent Research Topic in medicine and is increasingly being applied to dermatology. There is a need to understand this technology's progress to help guide and shape the future for medical care providers and recipients. We reviewed the literature to evaluate the types of publications on the subject, the specific dermatological topics addressed by AI, and the most challenging barriers to its implementation. A substantial number of original articles and commentaries have been published to date and only few detailed reviews exist. Most AI applications focus on differentiating between benign and malignant skin lesions, however; others exist pertaining to ulcers, inflammatory skin diseases, allergen exposure, dermatopathology, and gene expression profiling. Applications commonly analyze and classify images, however, other tools such as risk assessment calculators are becoming increasingly available. Although many applications are technologically feasible, important implementation barriers have been identified including systematic biases, difficulty of standardization, interpretability, and acceptance by physicians and patients alike. This review provides insight into future research needs and possibilities. There is a strong need for clinical investigation in dermatology providing evidence of success overcoming the identified barriers. With these research goals in mind, an appropriate role for AI in dermatology may be achieved in not so distant future.

Systematic review of machine learning for diagnosis and prognosis in dermatology

Background: Software systems using artificial intelligence for medical purposes have been developed in recent years. The success of deep neural networks (DNN) in 2012 in the image recognition challenge ImageNet LSVRC 2010 fueled expectations of the potential for using such systems in dermatology.Objective: To evaluate the ways in which machine learning has been utilized in dermatology to date and provide an overview of the findings in current literature on the subject.Methods: We conducted a systematic review of existing literature, identifying the literature through a systematic search of the PubMed database. Two doctors assessed screening and eligibility with respect to pre-determined inclusion and exclusion criteria.Results: A total of 2175 publications were identified, and 64 publications were included. We identified eight major categories where machine learning tools were tested in dermatology. Most systems involved image recognition tools that were primarily aimed at binary classification of malignant melanoma (MM). Short system descriptions and results of all included systems are presented in tables.Conclusions: We present a complete overview of artificial intelligence implemented in dermatology. Impressive outcomes were reported in all of the identified eight categories, but head-to-head comparison proved difficult. The many areas of dermatology where we identified machine learning tools indicate the diversity of machine learning.

Classification of skin lesions using transfer learning and augmentation with Alex-net

Skin cancer is one of most deadly diseases in humans. According to the high similarity between melanoma and nevus lesions, physicians take much more time to investigate these lesions. The automated classification of skin lesions will save effort, time and human life. The purpose of this paper is to present an automatic skin lesions classification system with higher classification rate using the theory of transfer learning and the pre-trained deep neural network. The transfer learning has been applied to the Alex-net in different ways, including fine-tuning the weights of the architecture, replacing the classification layer with a softmax layer that works with two or three kinds of skin lesions, and augmenting dataset by fixed and random rotation angles. The new softmax layer has the ability to classify the segmented color image lesions into melanoma and nevus or into melanoma, seborrheic keratosis, and nevus. The three well-known datasets, MED-NODE, Derm (IS & Quest) and ISIC, are used in testing and verifying the proposed method. The proposed DCNN weights have been fine-tuned using the training and testing dataset from ISIC in addition to 10-fold cross validation for MED-NODE and DermIS—DermQuest. The accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and precision measures are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method and the existing methods. For the datasets, MED-NODE, Derm (IS & Quest) and ISIC, the proposed method has achieved accuracy percentages of 96.86%, 97.70%, and 95.91% respectively. The performance of the proposed method has outperformed the performance of the existing classification methods of skin cancer.

Automatic diagnosis of melanoma using linear and nonlinear features from digital image

Melanoma is the most serious type of skin cancer and causes more deaths than other forms of skin cancer. It is a tiny small malignant mole that is usually black or brown but also appears in other color patterns. Early detection of melanoma is key as this is the time period when it is most likely to be cured. Due to the advancement of smartphone technology, automatic and efficient detection of melanoma mole using a smartphone is an active area of research. In this study, we developed an automatic melanoma diagnosis system using images captured from the digital camera. Our work differs from other studies in the area of segmentation of melanoma region and consideration of non-linear features for classification of malignant and benign melanoma. In this paper, a combination of Otsu and k-means clustering segmentation methods are applied to automatically segment and extract the borders of affected region with satisfactory accuracy. Also, we explored and extracted different non-linear features along with color and texture features existed in literature from the lesion mole. The effectiveness of these features was predicted with a machine learning model consisting of five different classifiers. Our model predicted the diagnosis of mole with an accuracy of 89.7%, i.e., around 10% more than reported results by others (to the best of our knowledge) with the same database.