Toward a combined tool to assist dermatologists in melanoma detection from dermoscopic images of pigmented skin lesions

In this paper we propose a machine learning approach to classify melanocytic lesions as malignant or benign, using dermoscopic images. The lesion features used in the classification framework are inspired on border, texture, color and structures used in popular dermoscopy algorithms performed by clinicians by visual inspection. The main weakness of dermoscopy algorithms is the selection of a set of weights and thresholds, that appear not to be robust or independent of population. The use of machine learning techniques allows to overcome this issue. The proposed method is designed and tested on an image database composed of 655 images of melanocytic lesions: 544 benign lesions and 111 malignant melanoma. After an image pre-processing stage that includes hair removal filtering, each image is automatically segmented using well known image segmentation algorithms. Then, each lesion is characterized by a feature vector that contains shape, color and texture information, as well as local and global parameters. The detection of particular dermoscopic patterns associated with melanoma is also addressed, and its inclusion in the classification framework is discussed. The learning and classification stage is performed using AdaBoost with C4.5 decision trees. For the automatically segmented database, classification delivered a specificity of 77% for a sensitivity of 90%. The same classification procedure applied to images manually segmented by an experienced dermatologist yielded a specificity of 85% for a sensitivity of 90%.