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Colour clusters for computer diagnosis of melanocytic lesions
Stefania Seidenari1, Costantino Grana, Giovanni Pellacani
1Department of Dermatology, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy.
Background:
To overcome subjectivity and variability in the interpretation of dermoscopic images, image analysis programs, enabling the numerical description of melanocytic lesion images, have been developed.
Objectives:
Our aim was to assess a method for the description of colours in melanocytic lesion images, based on the subdivision of image colours into red, green and blue clusters.
Methods:
Melanomas and naevi of the test set were described by means of 23 colour clusters previously selected by a training set comprising 369 melanocytic lesion images. The diagnostic performance obtained by this automated method was compared to sensitivity and specificity of diagnosis of 4 dermatologists.
Results:
Colour cluster values significantly differed between melanomas and naevi. Moreover, sensitivity and specificity values of computer diagnosis were similar to those achieved by the dermatologists.
Conclusion:
Our image analysis program based on the assessment of one single parameter has the diagnostic accuracy of dermatologists employing dermoscopy on a regular basis.
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