Analysis of multi-modal optical images of skin-lesions for skin-cancer detection and characterization

Optical imaging of skin-lesions for early detection and management of skin-cancers has been of significant interest in dermatology. Though there are optical imaging systems available today, such as the "Dermascope", they largely utilize surface illumination for epiluminescence light microscopy (ELM) imaging. Limitations of surface reflectance based imaging systems have been realized in producing images with important vascular and depth dependent information. We have developed a novel optical imaging system, the Nevoscope, that uses transillumination as to provide images of skin-lesions showing sub-surface pigmentation as well as vascular architecture based blood volume information. This paper presents a Nevoscope transillumination method to acquire vascular architecture information, and compare its performance to epiluminescence imaging method for its ability to measure vascular information for characterization of skin- lesions.© IEE

Automatic segmentation of skin lesion images using evolution strategies

ABSTRACT Malignant melanoma has a good prognosis if treated early. Accurate skin lesion segmentation from the background skin is important not only because the shape feature can be directly derived from the process, but also because it can provide a scope for texture analysis. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary strategy based segmentation algorithm to identify the lesion area by an ellipse. It can detect the lesion automatically without setting parameters manually. The method is validated by experiments and comparisons with manually segmentation by an expert and algorithms developed i

Standards in dermatologic imaging

The current era of ubiquitous digital cameras, digital cameras integrated into smartphones, and virtually limitless data storage affords exciting new opportunities for medicine in general and specifically dermatology. Digital photography has the potential to dramatically enable and facilitate improvements in dermatology teaching, clinical documentation, and diagnosis. One of the barriers to the diffusion of digital imaging into dermatology practice is the lack of standards for digital photography. As noted in the article by Quigley et al,1 there are currently no standards for dermatologic photography designated by Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. While some organizations, such as the American Teledermatology Association,2 have offered general guidelines, to our knowledge, no consistent actionable standards exist in medical publications. The absence of standards severely impedes the integration of dermatologic images across systems that support documentation, diagnosis, and clinical practice