Automated classification of malignant melanoma based on detection of atypical pigment network in dermoscopy images of skin lesions

“Melanoma causes more deaths than any other form of skin cancer. Early melanoma detection is important to prevent progression to a more deadly stage. Automated computer-based identification of melanoma from dermoscopic images of skin lesions is the most efficient method in early diagnosis. An automated melanoma identification system must include multiple steps, involving lesion segmentation, feature extraction, feature combination and classification. In this research, a classifier-based approach for automatically selecting a lesion border mask for segmentation of dermoscopic skin lesion images is presented. A logistic regression based model selects a single lesion border mask from multiple border masks generated by multiple lesion segmentation algorithms. This research also presents a method of segmenting atypical pigment network (APN) based on variance in the red plane in the lesion area of a dermoscopic image. Features extracted from APN regions are used in automated classification of melanoma. The automated identification of melanoma is further improved by fusion of other features relevant to melanoma detection. This research uses clinical features, APN features, median split cluster features, pink area features, white area features and salient point features in various hierarchical combinations to improve the overall performance in melanoma identification. A training set of 837 dermoscopic skin lesion images together with a disjoint test set of 804 dermoscopic skin lesion images are used in this research to produce the experimental findings”--Abstract, page iv

Deep Lesion Graphs in the Wild: Relationship Learning and Organization of Significant Radiology Image Findings in a Diverse Large-scale Lesion Database

Radiologists in their daily work routinely find and annotate significant abnormalities on a large number of radiology images. Such abnormalities, or lesions, have collected over years and stored in hospitals' picture archiving and communication systems. However, they are basically unsorted and lack semantic annotations like type and location. In this paper, we aim to organize and explore them by learning a deep feature representation for each lesion. A large-scale and comprehensive dataset, DeepLesion, is introduced for this task. DeepLesion contains bounding boxes and size measurements of over 32K lesions. To model their similarity relationship, we leverage multiple supervision information including types, self-supervised location coordinates and sizes. They require little manual annotation effort but describe useful attributes of the lesions. Then, a triplet network is utilized to learn lesion embeddings with a sequential sampling strategy to depict their hierarchical similarity structure. Experiments show promising qualitative and quantitative results on lesion retrieval, clustering, and classification. The learned embeddings can be further employed to build a lesion graph for various clinically useful applications. We propose algorithms for intra-patient lesion matching and missing annotation mining. Experimental results validate their effectiveness.Comment: Accepted by CVPR2018. DeepLesion url adde