Automated image analysis systems to quantify physical and behavioral attributes of biological entities

All life forms in nature have physical and behavioral attributes which help them survive and thrive in their environment. Technologies, both within the areas of hardware systems and data processing algorithms, have been developed to extract relevant information about these attributes. Understanding the complex interplay of physical and behavioral attributes is proving important towards identifying the phenotypic traits displayed by organisms. This thesis attempts to leverage the unique advantages of portable/mobile hardware systems and data processing algorithms for applications in three areas of bioengineering: skin cancer diagnostics, plant parasitic nematology, and neglected tropical disease. Chapter 1 discusses the challenges in developing image processing systems that meet the requirements of low cost, portability, high-throughput, and accuracy. The research motivation is inspired by these challenges within the areas of bioengineering that are still elusive to the technological advancements in hardware electronics and data processing algorithms. A literature review is provided on existing image analysis systems that highlight the limitations of current methods and provide scope for improvement. Chapter 2 is related to the area of skin cancer diagnostics where a novel smartphone-based method is presented for the early detection of melanoma in the comfort of a home setting. A smartphone application is developed along with imaging accessories to capture images of skin lesions and classify them as benign or cancerous. Information is extracted about the physical attributes of a skin lesion such as asymmetry, border irregularity, number of colors, and diameter. Machine learning is employed to train the smartphone application using both dermoscopic and digital lesion images. Chapter 3 is related to the area of plant parasitic nematology where automated methods are presented to provide the nematode egg count from soil samples. A new lensless imaging system is built to record holographic videos of soil particles flowing through microscale flow assays. Software algorithms are written to automatically identify the nematode eggs from low resolution holographic videos or images captured from a scanner. Deep learning algorithm was incorporated to improve the learning process and train the software model. Chapter 4 is related to the area of neglected tropical diseases where new worm tracking systems have been developed to characterize the phenotypic traits of Brugia malayi adult male worms and their microfilaria. The worm tracking algorithm recognizes behavioral attributes of these parasites by extracting a number of features related to their movement and body posture. An imaging platform is optimized to capture high-resolution videos with appropriate field of view of B. malayi. The relevance of each behavioral feature was evaluated through drug screening using three common antifilarial compounds. The abovementioned image analysis systems provide unique advantages to the current experimental methods. For example, the smartphone-based software application is a low-cost alternative to skin cancer diagnostics compared to standard dermoscopy available in skin clinics. The lensless imaging system is a low-cost and high-throughput alternative for obtaining egg count densities of plant parasitic nematodes compared with visual counting under a microscope by trained personnel. The B. malayi worm tracking system provides an alternative to available C. elegans tracking software with options to extract multiple parameters related to its body skeleton and posture

A mobile augmented reality application for supporting real-time skin lesion analysis based on deep learning

AbstractMelanoma is considered the deadliest skin cancer and when it is in an advanced state it is difficult to treat. Diagnoses are visually performed by dermatologists, by naked-eye observation. This paper proposes an augmented reality smartphone application for supporting the dermatologist in the real-time analysis of a skin lesion. The app augments the camera view with information related to the lesion features generally measured by the dermatologist for formulating the diagnosis. The lesion is also classified by a deep learning approach for identifying melanoma. The real-time process adopted for generating the augmented content is described. The real-time performances are also evaluated and a user study is also conducted. Results revealed that the real-time process may be entirely executed on the Smartphone and that the support provided is well judged by the target users

Melanoma Detection Using Mobile Technology and Feature-Based Classification Techniques

Melanoma is one of the most dangerous types of skin cancer in terms of the ratio of death cases. Probability of death increases when it is diagnosed late. However, it is possible to treat melanoma successfully when diagnosed in its early stages. One of the most common medical methods for diagnosing melanoma is the ABCD (Asymmetry, Border irregularity, Color, and Diameter) method that involves the measurement of four features of skin lesions. The main disadvantage of this method is that estimation error and subjectivity affects the accuracy of diagnosis, especially when performed by non-specialists. Scarcity of specialists makes the problem worse. This has led to the development of computer systems to help in melanoma diagnosis. However, while most computer systems can achieve high accuracy with adequate speed, they have problems in the usability and flexibility. The emergence of smart phones with increasing image capture and processing capabilities has made it more possible to use such devices to perform medical image analysis such as the diagnosis of melanoma. Our research work combines existing melanoma diagnosis method and the image capture and processing capabilities of smart phones to achieve fast, affordable, easily available and highly accurate melanoma diagnosis. In this work, we propose a complete smart phone application to capture, and process an image of the suspicious region of the skin in order to estimate its probability of being melanoma. The system can use historical cases to improve its diagnosis accuracy. The system was tested on 164 sample images. 14 images were not well-captured and could not be diagnosed, while the remaining 150 cases were successfully processed. In each of these 150 images, the lesion was correctly segmented and their ABCD feature set extracted. Diagnosis accuracy of the analyzed images ranged between 88%-94 with best results using SVM classifier, and worst is the KNN classifier.الميلانوما أحد أخطر أنواع سرطان الجلد من حيث نسبة عدد الوفيات الى حالات الاصابة ،تزداد الخطورة في الحالات التي يتم معالجتها في مراحل متأخرة ، ولكن يمكن علاج الميلانوما بنجاح اذا تم اكتشاف المرض في مراحله الاولى ، لذلك هناك العديد من الطرق المتبعة لتشخيص المرض في المراحل الأولى لتوجيه المريض الى الطبيب المختص مباشرة في حالة الشك في وجود المرض ، اشهر هذه الطرق هي طريقة ABCD، وأهم العقبات التي تواجه هذه الطريقة هي عدم دقة التنفيذ من الاشخاص غير المتخصصين ، لأن اعتماد الطريقة على خصائص مثل الحجم واللون والشكل يجعلها عرضة للكثير من التقدير والنسبية في التشخيص مما يفقد هذه الطريقة الكثير من الدقة في النتائج ، لذلك تم خلال الاعوام السابقة العمل على العديد من الانظمة المحوسبة التي تسعي الى المساعدة في التشخيص وتقليل نسبة الخطأ، وأتمتة التشخيص بحيث لا يخضع للتقدير الشخصي ، ومع بداية ظهور الاجهزة الذكية والتي تجاوز استخدامها حدود التواصل ليتم استخدامها في التقاط الصور بدقة عالية ومعالجة البيانات بكفاءة والتواصل مع شبكة الانترنت، كان اتجاه للاستفادة من مرونة الأجهزة الذكية ودقتها في التقاط الصور ومعالجتها من اجل توفير انظمة لتشخيص الأمراض المختلفة، وكان نصيب من هذه الابحاث والتطبيقات لتسهيل عملية تشخيص الميلانوما، ورغم توفر العديد من الأنظمة والابحاث الا أن النتائج لا تزال في المراحل الاولى حيث هناك العديد من العقبات، فلا تزال دقة هذه الانظمة لا تصل الى المستوى المطلوب مما يجعلها في بعض الحالات خطر على حياة المريض اذا تم تشخيص الحالات المصابة بشكل سلبي، كما ان امكانات معالجة الصور وتخزين البيانات وتصنيفها يعتبر من المجالات الجديدة والتي لم يتم اختبارها بشكل كافي في الابحاث السابقة ولم يتم التعامل مع الامكانات الجديدة للهواتف الذكية ، وخلال فترة قريبة كان مثلا تحليل كميات كبيرة من البيانات على الهواتف الذكية ومعالجتها وتصنيفها من الامور الغير ممكنة والتي اصبحت الان من الامور الممكنة في ظل تطور وحدات التخزين والمعالجة بشكل كبير للهواتف الذكية. لذلك جاء هذا العمل لمواصلة الجهد المبذول في توفير حل لمشكلة تشخيص مرض الميلانوما بشكل دقيق وفعال ومرن باستخدام الهواتف الذكية ، حيث تم استخدام امكانات الهواتف الذكية في التقاط الصور ومعالجتها بالإضافة لإمكانية تخزين المعلومات واستخدامها في التصنيف وتوقع الحالات الجديدة المصابة بالمرض، وتم بناء واختبار نظام كامل لتحقيق ذلك ، وقد كانت نتائج العمل مُرضِية جدا حيث تم فحص البرنامج على عينة مكونة من 164 صورة حيث نجح البرنامج في مرحلة معالجة الصورة في معالجة 150 صورة وعزل منطقة الآفة من أصل 164 صورة كما ذكرنا، علما ان نسبة النجاح في معالجة الصور تم تحسينها لتجاوز الأخطاء اثناء التقاط الصور من خلال استخدام واجهة تفاعلية للمستخدم ، اما في مرحلة التصنيف علي 150 صورة الناتجة من معالجة الصور فكانت دقة نتائج التصنيف بين 88-94% حسب نظام التصنيف المتبع ، وهي نتائج جيدة و يمكن البناء عليها في استخدام الموبايل في التشخيص الأولى لمرضى الميلانوم

Classification of Melanoma and Nevus in Digital Images for Diagnosis of Skin Cancer

Melanoma is considered a fatal type of skin cancer. However, it is sometimes hard to distinguish it from nevus due to their identical visual appearance and symptoms. The mortality rate because of this disease is higher than all other skin-related consolidated malignancies. The number of cases is growing among young people, but if it is diagnosed at an earlier stage, then the survival rates become very high. The cost and time required for the doctors to diagnose all patients for melanoma are very high. In this paper, we propose an intelligent system to detect and distinguish melanoma from nevus by using the state-of-the-art image processing techniques. At first, the Gaussian filter is used for removing noise from the skin lesion of the acquired images followed by the use of improved K-mean clustering to segment out the lesion. A distinctive hybrid superfeature vector is formed by the extraction of textural and color features from the lesion. Support vector machine (SVM) is utilized for the classification of skin cancer into melanoma and nevus. Our aim is to test the effectiveness of the proposed segmentation technique, extract the most suitable features, and compare the classification results with the other techniques present in the literature. The proposed methodology is tested on the DERMIS dataset having a total number of 397 skin cancer images: 146 are melanoma and 251 are nevus skin lesions. Our proposed methodology archives encouraging results having 96% accuracy

Skin Lesion Extraction And Its Application

In this thesis, I study skin lesion detection and its applications to skin cancer diagnosis. A skin lesion detection algorithm is proposed. The proposed algorithm is based color information and threshold. For the proposed algorithm, several color spaces are studied and the detection results are compared. Experimental results show that YUV color space can achieve the best performance. Besides, I develop a distance histogram based threshold selection method and the method is proven to be better than other adaptive threshold selection methods for color detection. Besides the detection algorithms, I also investigate GPU speed-up techniques for skin lesion extraction and the results show that GPU has potential applications in speeding-up skin lesion extraction. Based on the skin lesion detection algorithms proposed, I developed a mobile-based skin cancer diagnosis application. In this application, the user with an iPhone installed with the proposed application can use the iPhone as a diagnosis tool to find the potential skin lesions in a persons\u27 skin and compare the skin lesions detected by the iPhone with the skin lesions stored in a database in a remote server

A Review on Skin Disease Classification and Detection Using Deep Learning Techniques

Skin cancer ranks among the most dangerous cancers. Skin cancers are commonly referred to as Melanoma. Melanoma is brought on by genetic faults or mutations on the skin, which are caused by Unrepaired Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) in skin cells. It is essential to detect skin cancer in its infancy phase since it is more curable in its initial phases. Skin cancer typically progresses to other regions of the body. Owing to the disease's increased frequency, high mortality rate, and prohibitively high cost of medical treatments, early diagnosis of skin cancer signs is crucial. Due to the fact that how hazardous these disorders are, scholars have developed a number of early-detection techniques for melanoma. Lesion characteristics such as symmetry, colour, size, shape, and others are often utilised to detect skin cancer and distinguish benign skin cancer from melanoma. An in-depth investigation of deep learning techniques for melanoma's early detection is provided in this study. This study discusses the traditional feature extraction-based machine learning approaches for the segmentation and classification of skin lesions. Comparison-oriented research has been conducted to demonstrate the significance of various deep learning-based segmentation and classification approaches

Automating the ABCD Rule for Melanoma Detection: A Survey

The ABCD rule is a simple framework that physicians, novice dermatologists and non-physicians can use to learn about the features of melanoma in its early curable stage, enhancing thereby the early detection of melanoma. Since the interpretation of the ABCD rule traits is subjective, different solutions have been proposed in literature to tackle such subjectivity and provide objective evaluations to the different traits. This paper reviews the main contributions in literature towards automating asymmetry, border irregularity, color variegation and diameter, where the different methods involved have been highlighted. This survey could serve as an essential reference for researchers interested in automating the ABCD rule