Malignant Melenoma and Atypical Nevus Classification Using Machine Learning with Shape and Assymetric Features

Skin cancer is the irregular growth of skin cells, which is most often termed as cancer, developed by exposure of ultraviolet rays from sun. In this research paper, deep learning enabled hybrid optimization is followed for skin cancer detection and lesion segmentation. Two optimization algorithms are followed for skin lesion segmentation and cancer detection. Here, pre-processing is done by anisotropic diffusion followed by skin lesion segmentation. Here, Multi-Scale Residual Fusion Network (MSRFNet) is utilized for skin lesion segmentation, which is trained by proposed Average Subtraction Student Psychology Based Optimization (ASSPBO). After skin lesion segmentation, necessary features are extracted, followed by skin cancer detection. Skin cancer is detected by Deep Residual Network (DRN) trained by proposed Fractional ASSPBO (FrASSPBO). Moreover, performance of proposed FrASSPBO-DRN is analysed by three performance metrics like testing accuracy, True Positive Rate (TPR), and False Positive Rate (FPR) with values of 93.4%, 94%, and 8.2%.

The medical sciences are facing a major problem with the auto-detection of disease due to the fast growth in population density. Intelligent systems assist medical professionals in early disease detection and also help to provide consistent treatment that reduces the mortality rate. Skin cancer is considered to be the deadliest and most severe kind of cancer. Medical professionals utilize dermoscopy images to make a manual diagnosis of skin cancer. This method is labor-intensive and time-consuming and demands a considerable level of expertise. Automated detection methods are necessary for the early detection of skin cancer. The occurrence of hair and air bubbles in dermoscopic images affects the diagnosis of skin cancer. This research aims to classify eight different types of skin cancer, namely actinic keratosis (AKs), dermatofibroma (DFa), melanoma (MELa), basal cell carcinoma (BCCa), squamous cell carcinoma (SCCa), melanocytic nevus (MNi), vascular lesion (VASn), and benign keratosis (BKs). In this study, we propose SNC_Net, which integrates features derived from dermoscopic images through deep learning (DL) models and handcrafted (HC) feature extraction methods with the aim of improving the performance of the classifier. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is employed for classification. Dermoscopy images from the publicly accessible ISIC 2019 dataset for skin cancer detection is utilized to train and validate the model. The performance of the proposed model is compared with four baseline models, namely EfficientNetB0 (B1), MobileNetV2 (B2), DenseNet-121 (B3), and ResNet-101 (B4), and six state-of-the-art (SOTA) classifiers. With an accuracy of 97.81%, a precision of 98.31%, a recall of 97.89%, and an F1 score of 98.10%, the proposed model outperformed the SOTA classifiers as well as the four baseline models. Moreover, an Ablation study is also performed on the proposed method to validate its performance. The proposed method therefore assists dermatologists and other medical professionals in early skin cancer detection.

Abstract: Early detection of skin cancer, including types such as basal cell carcinoma and melanoma, is crucial for effective treatment and reducing mortality rates. Skin cancer diagnoses often surpass those of all other cancers combined, with rising global mortality rates underscoring the need for improved detection methods. Early identification significantly enhances treatment outcomes, as confirmed by the World Health Organization. Advances in image processing and machine vision, particularly through convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have shown that deep learning models can outperform experienced dermatologists in skin cancer detection. In this project, we developed a deep learning model using Python libraries to categorize dermoscopic images from the MNIST HAM-10000 dataset into malignant or benign categories. The model's performance was further evaluated against three datasets from the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) challenge archives, with the goal of enhancing early detection and treatment of skin cancer to lower mortality rates

the early detection and successful treatment of skin cancers, a potent form of cancer, calls for the use of sophisticated diagnostic instruments. This study delves into the use of support vector machines (SVMs), to cope with the inconsistencies occurring among skin lesions, by merging them with feature fusion techniques. SVMs are preferred for this situation, as they are highly effective when it comes to the management of exceedingly dimensional data. Initially, in order to train and enhance the diagnostic capacity of the SVM classifier, a single and all-inclusive single dataset was generated through the analysis, identification and extraction of a wide variety of explanatory features (including colour, texture and shape) from a dataset comprising 10000 dermatoscope skin lesion representations. This was followed by the use of early and late fusion approaches, to generate an extensive dataset of descriptions, for assessing the reliability of the SVM classifier. Finally, the accuracy, precision and recall of the SVM classifier were ascertained by way of an objective dataset, comprising 25 dermatoscope representations of malignant and benign lesions. The accuracy, precision and recall of the SVM classifier are supported by its capacity to distinguish 10 true positives, 12 true negatives, three false positives and zero false negatives. As such, the SVM classifier can be considered effective, for the early detection of skin cancers. The results from this investigation verify that the capacity of SVMs, in terms of skin cancer diagnosis, is greatly improved with the utilization of feature fusion techniques. Also verified through this undertaking, is the effectiveness of innovative computational procedures, for the delivery of dependable medical diagnoses.

Melanoma skin cancer is the most life-threatening and fatal disease among the family of skin cancer diseases. Modern technological developments and research methodologies made it possible to detect and identify this kind of skin cancer more effectively; however, the automated localization and segmentation of skin lesion at earlier stages is still a challenging task due to the low contrast between melanoma moles and skin portion and a higher level of color similarity between melanoma-affected and -nonaffected areas. In this paper, we present a fully automated method for segmenting the skin melanoma at its earliest stage by employing a deep-learning-based approach, namely faster region-based convolutional neural networks (RCNN) along with fuzzy k-means clustering (FKM). Several clinical images are utilized to test the presented method so that it may help the dermatologist in diagnosing this life-threatening disease at its earliest stage. The presented method first preprocesses the dataset images to remove the noise and illumination problems and enhance the visual information before applying the faster-RCNN to obtain the feature vector of fixed length. After that, FKM has been employed to segment the melanoma-affected portion of skin with variable size and boundaries. The performance of the presented method is evaluated on the three standard datasets, namely ISBI-2016, ISIC-2017, and PH2, and the results show that the presented method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. The presented method attains an average accuracy of 95.40, 93.1, and 95.6% on the ISIC-2016, ISIC-2017, and PH2 datasets, respectively, which is showing its robustness to skin lesion recognition and segmentation.

ObjectiveIn computer-aided medical diagnosis, precise skin lesion segmentation is crucial for the early detection and treatment of skin cancer. However, challenges such as unclear lesion boundaries, low contrast, and varying lesion shapes make accurate segmentation a difficult task. To address these challenges, we propose DMFF-Net, a multi-scale, multi-attention feature fusion network based on DeepLabV3, designed to improve the accuracy of skin lesion segmentation.MethodsDMFF-Net integrates several advanced modules to enhance segmentation performance. The network incorporates a Global Grid Coordinate Attention Module (GGCAM), which effectively fuses spatial and channel features to capture the complex relationships between local and global information. Additionally, a Multi-Scale Depthwise Separable Dilated Convolution (MDSDC) module is employed to strengthen multi-scale feature extraction, thereby preventing resolution degradation during convolution. A Mid-High Level Feature Fusion (MHLFF) module is also introduced to refine critical feature representations and suppress irrelevant information, thereby improving segmentation accuracy.ResultsThe proposed network was evaluated on four publicly available datasets: ISIC 2016, ISIC 2017, ISIC 2018, and PH2. The results show that DMFF-Net significantly outperforms existing advanced methods. Specifically, it achieves MIoU values of 89.31%, 91.47%, and 86.93% on the ISIC 2016, ISIC 2017, and ISIC 2018 datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the network achieves accuracy values of 95.62%, 97.33%, and 94.78%, and F1 scores of 96.93%, 94.91%, and 93.61%, respectively, demonstrating its robustness and effectiveness in skin lesion segmentation.ConclusionThe DMFF-Net model, with its multi-scale feature fusion and attention mechanisms, substantially improves skin lesion segmentation by preserving crucial spatial details and improving feature representation. Its superior performance on multiple datasets highlights its potential as a powerful tool for skin lesion diagnosis and provides an important reference for future advancements in medical image segmentation.

Bagged textural and color features for melanoma skin cancer detection in dermoscopic and standard images

Skin cancers are the most common form of cancers in humans. It is a deadly type of cancer affecting skin. Most of the skin cancers are curable at initial stages. So an early detection of skin cancer can save the patients. Conventional diagnosis method for skin cancer detection is Biopsy method. It is done by removing or scraping off skin and that sample undergoes a series of laboratory testing. It is painful and time consuming one. Computer based skin cancer detection is more advantageous to patients, by which patients can identify the skin cancer without going to hospital or without the help of a doctor. Computer based detection uses imaging techniques and Artificial Intelligence. The different stages of detection involves- collection of dermoscopic images, filtering the images for removing hairs and noises, segmenting the images using Maximum Entropy Threshold, feature extraction using Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix(GLCM), and classification using Artificial Neural Network(ANN). Back-Propagation Neural (BPN) Network is used for classification purpose. It classifies the given data set into cancerous or non-cancerous.

The early detection of skin cancer, especially through the examination of lesions with malignant characteristics, has been reported to significantly decrease the potential fatalities. Segmentation of the regions that contain the actual lesions is one of the most widely used steps for achieving an automated diagnostic process of skin lesions. However, accurate segmentation of skin lesions has proven to be a challenging task in medical imaging because of the intrinsic factors such as the existence of undesirable artifacts and the complexity surrounding the seamless acquisition of lesion images. In this paper, we have introduced a novel algorithm based on gamma correction with clustering of keypoint descriptors for accurate segmentation of lesion areas in dermoscopy images. The algorithm was tested on dermoscopy images acquired from the publicly available dataset of Pedro Hispano hospital to achieve compelling equidistant sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy scores of 87.29%, 99.54%, and 96.02%, respectively. Moreover, the validation of the algorithm on a subset of heavily noised skin lesion images collected from the public dataset of International Skin Imaging Collaboration has yielded the equidistant sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy scores of 80.59%, 100.00%, and 94.98%, respectively. The performance results are propitious when compared to those obtained with existing modern algorithms using the same standard benchmark datasets and performance evaluation indices.

The effective segmentation of lesion(s) from dermoscopic skin images assists the Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems in improving the diagnosing rate of skin cancer. The results of the existing skin lesion segmentation techniques are not up to the mark for dermoscopic images with artifacts like varying size corner borders with color similar to lesion(s) and/or hairs having low contrast with surrounding background. To improve the results of the existing skin lesion segmentation techniques for such kinds of dermoscopic images, an effective skin lesion segmentation method is proposed in this research work. The proposed method searches for the presence of corner borders in the given dermoscopc image and removes them if found otherwise it starts searching for the presence of hairs on it and eliminate them if present. Next, it enhances the resultant image using state-of-the-art image enhancement method and segments lesion from it using machine learning technique namely, GrabCut method. The proposed method was tested on PH2 and ISIC 2018 datasets containing 200 images each and its accuracy was measured with two evaluation metrics, i.e., Jaccard index, and Dice index. The evaluation results show that our proposed skin lesion segmentation method obtained Jaccard Index of 0.77, 0.80 and Dice index of 0.87, 0.82 values on PH2, and ISIC2018 datasets, respectively, which are better than state-of-the-art skin lesion segmentation techniques.

“Dysplastic nevus” syndrome: Does a survey make it real?

The prevalence of melanoma skin cancer disease is rapidly increasing as recorded death cases of its patients continue to annually escalate. Reliable segmentation of skin lesion is one essential requirement of an efficient noninvasive computer aided diagnosis tool for accelerating the identification process of melanoma. This paper presents a new algorithm based on perceptual color difference saliency along with binary morphological analysis for segmentation of melanoma skin lesion in dermoscopic images. The new algorithm is compared with existing image segmentation algorithms on benchmark dermoscopic images acquired from public corpora. Results of both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the new algorithm are encouraging as the algorithm performs excellently in comparison with the existing image segmentation algorithms.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a branch of deep learning which have been turned into one of the popular methods in different applications, especially medical imaging. One of the significant applications in this category is to help specialists make an early detection of skin cancer in dermoscopy and can reduce mortality rate. However, there are a lot of reasons that affect system diagnosis accuracy. In recent years, the utilization of computer-aided technology for this purpose has been turned into an interesting category for scientists. In this research, a meta-heuristic optimized CNN classifier is applied for pre-trained network models for visual datasets with the purpose of classifying skin cancer images. However there are different methods about optimizing the learning step of neural networks, and there are few studies about the deep learning based neural networks and their applications. In the present work, a new approach based on whale optimization algorithm is utilized for optimizing the weight and biases in the CNN models. The new method is then compared with 10 popular classifiers on two skin cancer datasets including DermIS Digital Database Dermquest Database. Experimental results show that the use of this optimized method performs with better accuracy than other classification methods.

Deaths due to various types of cancers have increased to a greater extent in decades. Computer-aided diagnosis is the fast and efficient way used in the medical field all around the globe for early diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The design of such automated systems is a major challenge in the medical field due to various aspects and the availability of data for testing these systems. Skin cancer is one such type of cancer that if treated at an early stage helps to reduce the mortality rate. Many technological solutions have been provided by researchers in the last decade for the early detection and classification of skin cancer. Hair detection and removal is one of the primary pre-processing step in the skin cancer detection process. Dull Razor, Adaptive Principal Curvature, E-shaver, etc. are common techniques used for hair detection and removal. These methods aim to remove the hairs from the lesion image, but some artifacts and background abnormalities are left behind in the resultant images. In this paper, slight functional modification using different color spaces and hybridization of various existing techniques for hair detection and removal has been proposed. The proposed techniques are evaluated on standard dermoscopic datasets using different standard performance metrics like Accuracy, Sensitivity, Specificity, False Positive Rate, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio, and Structural Similarity Index Measure. The proposed pre-processing methods are tested for classification accuracy using VGG-16 model. The evaluation results indicate that Modified E-shaver and Modified Dull Razor methods perform better than existing systems.

Early detection of skin cancer allows timely treatment and improves clinical outcome. The armamentarium for diagnosing skin cancer has been growing notably over the last decades. New tools have led to earlier recognition and a more specific and sensitive diagnosis. In this editorial, we discuss several recent studies published in the BJD on the diagnosis of pigmented skin lesions. The majority of studies published on the detection of skin cancer have investigated methods that are already widely accepted and increasingly used in dermatology, such as dermatoscopy, reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) and teledermatology. Other investigators have walked off the beaten paths and reported unconventional findings, for example Willis et al. investigated a dog's olfactory ability to discriminate melanoma from control skin lesions.1 In this study, a Labrador, named Ronnie, performed 20 double‐blind tests, each requiring the selection of one melanoma from nine controls, consisting of three each of basal cell carcinomas, naevi and healthy skin. Ronnie correctly identified the melanoma on nine occasions (45%), vs. two expected by chance alone. This creative work demonstrates that invasive melanoma emits volatile organic compounds that differ from those of control lesions. The volatile compounds might be utilized as new biomarkers for a noninvasive diagnosis of melanoma using standardized biochemical assays.