Melanoma Recognition Using Representative and Discriminative Kernel Classifiers

Malignant melanoma is the most deadly for of skin lesion. Early diagnosis is of critical importance to patient survival. Visual recognition algorithms could potentially be of great help for physicians in a computer assisted diagnosis system. Previous work on this topic has focused mostly on developing ad\--hoc segmentation and feature extraction methods. In this paper we take a completely different approach. We put the emphasis on the learning part of the algorithm by using two kernel\--based classifiers, one discriminative and one probabilistic. As a discriminative approach we chose support vector machines, a state of the art large\--margin classifier which was proved very successful on visual applications. As a probabilistic approach we chose spin glass\--Markov random fields, a kernel Gibbs distribution inspired by results of statistical physics. We benchmarked these algorithms against the (to our knowledge) state\--of\--the\--art method on melanoma recognition, exploring how performance changes by using color or textural features, and how it is affected by the quality of the segmentation mask. We show with extensive experiments that the support vector machine approach outperforms the existing method and, on two classes out of three, it achieves performances comparable to those obtained by expert clinicians

Kernel Methods for Melanoma Recognition

Malignant melanoma is the most deadly for of skin lesion. Early diagnosis is of critical importance to patient survival. Visual recognition algorithms could potentially be of great help for physicians in a computer assisted diagnosis system. Previous work on this topic has focused mostly on developing ad-hoc segmentation and feature extraction methods. In this paper we take a completely different approach. We put the emphasis on the learning part of the algorithm by using two kernel-based classifiers, one discriminative and one probabilistic. As a discriminative approach we chose support vector machines, a state of the art large-margin classifier which was proved very successful on visual applications. As a probabilistic approach we chose spin glass-Markov random fields, a kernel Gibbs distribution inspired by results of statistical physics. We benchmarked these algorithms against the (to our knowledge) state-of-the-art method on melanoma recognition, exploring how performance changes by using color or textural features, and how it is affected by the quality of the segmentation mask. We show with extensive experiments that the support vector machine approach outperforms the existing method and, on two classes out of three, it achieves performances comparable to those obtained by expert clinician

Universal in vivo Textural Model for Human Skin based on Optical Coherence Tomograms

Currently, diagnosis of skin diseases is based primarily on visual pattern recognition skills and expertise of the physician observing the lesion. Even though dermatologists are trained to recognize patterns of morphology, it is still a subjective visual assessment. Tools for automated pattern recognition can provide objective information to support clinical decision-making. Noninvasive skin imaging techniques provide complementary information to the clinician. In recent years, optical coherence tomography has become a powerful skin imaging technique. According to specific functional needs, skin architecture varies across different parts of the body, as do the textural characteristics in OCT images. There is, therefore, a critical need to systematically analyze OCT images from different body sites, to identify their significant qualitative and quantitative differences. Sixty-three optical and textural features extracted from OCT images of healthy and diseased skin are analyzed and in conjunction with decision-theoretic approaches used to create computational models of the diseases. We demonstrate that these models provide objective information to the clinician to assist in the diagnosis of abnormalities of cutaneous microstructure, and hence, aid in the determination of treatment. Specifically, we demonstrate the performance of this methodology on differentiating basal cell carcinoma (BCC) and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) from healthy tissue

Diagnosis of Malignant Melanoma using a Neural Network

Malignant melanoma is the deadliest form of all skin cancers. Approximately 32,000 new cases of malignant melanoma were diagnosed in 1991, with approximately 80 percent of patients expected to survive five years [1], Fortunately, if detected early, even malignant melanoma may be treated successfully. Thus, in recent years, there has been a rising interest in the automated detection and diagnosis of skin cancer, particularly malignant melanoma [2]. In this thesis, a novel neural network approach for the automated distinction of melanoma from three benign categories of tumors which exhibit melanoma-like characteristics is presented. The approach is based on devising new and discriminant features which are used as inputs to an artificial neural network for classification of tumor images as malignant or benign. Promising results have been obtained using this method on real skin cancer images

A Self-adaptive Discriminative Autoencoder for Medical Applications

Computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems play an essential role in the early detection and diagnosis of developing disease for medical applications. In order to obtain the highly recognizable representation for the medical images, a self-adaptive discriminative autoencoder (SADAE) is proposed in this paper. The proposed SADAE system is implemented under a deep metric learning framework which consists of K local autoencoders, employed to learn the K subspaces that represent the diverse distribution of the underlying data, and a global autoencoder to restrict the spatial scale of the learned representation of images. Such community of autoencoders is aided by a self-adaptive metric learning method that extracts the discriminative features to recognize the different categories in the given images. The quality of the extracted features by SADAE is compared against that of those extracted by other state-of-the-art deep learning and metric learning methods on five popular medical image data sets. The experimental results demonstrate that the medical image recognition results gained by SADAE are much improved over those by the alternatives

Deep learning data augmentation for Raman spectroscopy cancer tissue classification.

Recently, Raman Spectroscopy (RS) was demonstrated to be a non-destructive way of cancer diagnosis, due to the uniqueness of RS measurements in revealing molecular biochemical changes between cancerous vs. normal tissues and cells. In order to design computational approaches for cancer detection, the quality and quantity of tissue samples for RS are important for accurate prediction. In reality, however, obtaining skin cancer samples is difficult and expensive due to privacy and other constraints. With a small number of samples, the training of the classifier is difficult, and often results in overfitting. Therefore, it is important to have more samples to better train classifiers for accurate cancer tissue classification. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a novel generative adversarial network based skin cancer tissue classification framework. Specifically, we design a data augmentation module that employs a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to generate synthetic RS data resembling the training data classes. The original tissue samples and the generated data are concatenated to train classification modules. Experiments on real-world RS data demonstrate that (1) data augmentation can help improve skin cancer tissue classification accuracy, and (2) generative adversarial network can be used to generate reliable synthetic Raman spectroscopic data