Dermoscopic diagnosis of melanoma in a 4D space constructed by active contour extracted features

Dermoscopy, also known as epiluminescence microscopy, is a major imaging technique used in the assessment of melanoma and other diseases of skin. In this study we propose a computer aided method and tools for fast and automated diagnosis of malignant skin lesions using non-linear classifiers. The method consists of three main stages: (1) skin lesion features extraction from images; (2) features measurement and digitization; and (3) skin lesion binary diagnosis (classification), using the extracted features. A shrinking active contour (S-ACES) extracts color regions boundaries, the number of colors, and lesion's boundary, which is used to calculate the abrupt boundary. Quantification methods for measurements of asymmetry and abrupt endings in skin lesions are elaborated to approach the second stage of the method. The total dermoscopy score (TDS) formula of the ABCD rule is modeled as linear support vector machines (SVM). Further a polynomial SVM classifier is developed. To validate the proposed framework a dataset of 64 lesion images were selected from a collection with a ground truth. The lesions were classified as benign or malignant by the TDS based model and the SVM polynomial classifier. Comparing the results, we showed that the latter model has a better f-measure then the TDS-based model (linear classifier) in the classification of skin lesions into two groups, malignant and benign.