Desenvolvimento de software e hardware para diagnóstico e acompanhamento de lesões dermatológicas suspeitas para câncer de pele

Cancer is responsible for about 7 million deaths annually worldwide. It is estimated that 25% of all cancers are skin, and in Brazil the most frequent in all geographic regions type. Among them, the melanoma type, accounting for 4% of skin cancers, whose incidence has doubled worldwide in the past decade. Among the diagnostic methods employed, it is cited ABCD rule which considers asymmetry (A), edges (B), color (C) and diameter (D) stains or nevi. The digital image processing has shown good potential to aid in early diagnosis of melanoma. In this sense, the objective of this study was to develop software in MATLAB® platform, associated with hardware to standardize image acquisition aiming at performing the diagnosis and monitoring of suspected malignancy (melanoma) skin lesions. Was used as the ABCD rule for guiding the development of methods of computational analysis. We used MATLAB as a programming environment for the development of software for digital image processing. The images used were acquired two banks pictures free access. Images of melanomas (n = 15) and pictures nevi (not cancer) (n = 15) were included. We used the image in RGB color channel, which were converted to grayscale, application of 8x8 median filter and approximation technique for 3x3 neighborhood. After we preceded binarization and reversing black and white for subsequent feature extraction contours of the lesion. For the standardized image acquisition was developed a prototype hardware, which was not used in this study (that used with enclosed diagnostic images of image banks), but has been validated for evaluation of lesion diameter (D). We used descriptive statistics where the groups were subjected to non-parametric test for two independent samples Mann-Whitney U test yet, to evaluate the sensitivity (SE) and specificity (SP) of each variable, we used the ROC curve. The classifier used was an artificial neural network with radial basis function, obtaining diagnostic accuracy for melanoma images and 100% for images not cancer of 90.9%. Thus, the overall diagnostic accuracy for prediction was 95.5%. Regarding the SE and SP of the proposed method, obtained an area under the ROC curve of 0.967, which suggests an excellent diagnostic ability to predict, especially with low costs, since the software can be run in most systems operational use today.O câncer é responsável por cerca de 7 milhões de óbitos anuais em todo o mundo. Estima-se que 25% de todos os cânceres são de pele, sendo no Brasil o tipo mais incidente em todas as regiões geográficas. Entre eles, o tipo melanoma, responsável por 4% dos cânceres de pele, cuja incidência dobrou mundialmente nos últimos dez anos. Entre os métodos diagnósticos empregados, cita-se a regra ABCD, que leva em consideração assimetria (A), bordas (B), cor (C) e diâmetro (D) de manchas ou nevos. O processamento digital de imagens tem mostrado um bom potencial para auxiliar no diagnóstico precoce de melanomas. Neste sentido, o objetivo do presente estudo foi desenvolver um software, na plataforma MATLAB®, associado a um hardware para padronizar a aquisição de imagens, visando realizar o diagnóstico e acompanhamento de lesões cutâneas suspeitas de malignidade (melanoma). Utilizou-se como norteador a regra ABCD para o desenvolvimento de métodos de análise computacional. Empregou-se o MATLAB como ambiente de programação para o desenvolvimento de um software para o processamento digital de imagens. As imagens utilizadas foram adquiridas de dois bancos de imagens de acesso livre. Foram inclusas imagens de melanomas (n=15) e imagens nevos (não câncer) (n=15). Utilizaram-se imagens no canal de cor RGB, as quais foram convertidas para escala de cinza, aplicação de filtro de mediana 8x8 e técnica de aproximação por vizinhança 3x3. Após, procedeu-se a binarização e inversão de preto e branco para posterior extração das características do contorno da lesão. Para a aquisição padronizada de imagens foi desenvolvido um protótipo de hardware, o qual não foi empregado neste estudo (que utilizou imagens com diagnóstico fechado, de bancos de imagem), mas foi validado para a avaliação do diâmetro das lesões (D). Utilizou-se a estatística descritiva onde os grupos foram submetidos ao teste não paramétrico para duas amostras independentes de Mann-Whitney U. Ainda, para avaliar a sensibilidade (SE) e especificidade (SP) de cada variável, empregou-se a curva ROC. O classificador utilizado foi uma rede neural artificial de base radial, obtendo acerto diagnóstico para as imagens melanomas de 100% e para imagens não câncer de 90,9%. Desta forma, o acerto global para predição diagnóstica foi de 95,5%. Em relação a SE e SP do método proposto, obteve uma área sob a curva ROC de 0,967, o que sugere uma excelente capacidade de predição diagnóstica, sobretudo, com baixo custo de utilização, visto que o software pode ser executado na grande maioria dos sistemas operacionais hoje utilizados

IMAGE UNDERSTANDING OF MOLAR PREGNANCY BASED ON ANOMALIES DETECTION

Cancer occurs when normal cells grow and multiply without normal control. As the cells multiply, they form an area of abnormal cells, known as a tumour. Many tumours exhibit abnormal chromosomal segregation at cell division. These anomalies play an important role in detecting molar pregnancy cancer. Molar pregnancy, also known as hydatidiform mole, can be categorised into partial (PHM) and complete (CHM) mole, persistent gestational trophoblastic and choriocarcinoma. Hydatidiform moles are most commonly found in women under the age of 17 or over the age of 35. Hydatidiform moles can be detected by morphological and histopathological examination. Even experienced pathologists cannot easily classify between complete and partial hydatidiform moles. However, the distinction between complete and partial hydatidiform moles is important in order to recommend the appropriate treatment method. Therefore, research into molar pregnancy image analysis and understanding is critical. The hypothesis of this research project is that an anomaly detection approach to analyse molar pregnancy images can improve image analysis and classification of normal PHM and CHM villi. The primary aim of this research project is to develop a novel method, based on anomaly detection, to identify and classify anomalous villi in molar pregnancy stained images. The novel method is developed to simulate expert pathologists’ approach in diagnosis of anomalous villi. The knowledge and heuristics elicited from two expert pathologists are combined with the morphological domain knowledge of molar pregnancy, to develop a heuristic multi-neural network architecture designed to classify the villi into their appropriated anomalous types. This study confirmed that a single feature cannot give enough discriminative power for villi classification. Whereas expert pathologists consider the size and shape before textural features, this thesis demonstrated that the textural feature has a higher discriminative power than size and shape. The first heuristic-based multi-neural network, which was based on 15 elicited features, achieved an improved average accuracy of 81.2%, compared to the traditional multi-layer perceptron (80.5%); however, the recall of CHM villi class was still low (64.3%). Two further textural features, which were elicited and added to the second heuristic-based multi-neural network, have improved the average accuracy from 81.2% to 86.1% and the recall of CHM villi class from 64.3% to 73.5%. The precision of the multi-neural network II has also increased from 82.7% to 89.5% for normal villi class, from 81.3% to 84.7% for PHM villi class and from 80.8% to 86% for CHM villi class. To support pathologists to visualise the results of the segmentation, a software tool, Hydatidiform Mole Analysis Tool (HYMAT), was developed compiling the morphological and pathological data for each villus analysis

Skeletonization methods for image and volume inpainting

Image and shape restoration techniques are increasingly important in computer graphics. Many types of restoration techniques have been proposed in the 2D image-processing and according to our knowledge only one to volumetric data. Well-known examples of such techniques include digital inpainting, denoising, and morphological gap filling. However efficient and effective, such methods have several limitations with respect to the shape, size, distribution, and nature of the defects they can find and eliminate. We start by studying the use of 2D skeletons for the restoration of two-dimensional images. To this end, we show that skeletons are useful and efficient for volumetric data reconstruction. To explore our hypothesis in the 3D case, we first overview the existing state-of-the-art in 3D skeletonization methods, and conclude that no such method provides us with the features required by efficient and effective practical usage. We next propose a novel method for 3D skeletonization, and show how it complies with our desired quality requirements, which makes it thereby suitable for volumetric data reconstruction context. The joint results of our study show that skeletons are indeed effective tools to design a variety of shape restoration methods. Separately, our results show that suitable algorithms and implementations can be conceived to yield high end-to-end performance and quality of skeleton-based restoration methods. Finally, our practical applications can generate competitive results when compared to application areas such as digital hair removal and wire artifact removal