An automated skin melanoma detection system with melanoma-index based on entropy features

• Published in: Biocybernetics and biomedical engineering 2021-07, Vol.41 (3), p.997-1012
• Main Authors: Cheong, Kang Hao, Tang, Kenneth Jian Wei, Zhao, Xinxing, Koh, Joel En Wei, Faust, Oliver, Gururajan, Raj, Ciaccio, Edward J., Rajinikanth, V., Acharya, U. Rajendra
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bi-dimensional empirical mode decomposition; Classification; Digital dermoscopy; Feature extraction; Melanoma-index formulation; Skin melanoma
• ISSN: 0208-5216
• DOI: 10.1016/j.bbe.2021.05.010

Skin melanoma is a potentially life-threatening cancer. Once it has metastasized, it may cause severe disability and death. Therefore, early diagnosis is important to improve the conditions and outcomes for patients. The disease can be diagnosed based on Digital-Dermoscopy (DD) images. In this study, we propose an original and novel Automated Skin-Melanoma Detection (ASMD) system with Melanoma-Index (MI). The system incorporates image pre-processing, Bi-dimensional Empirical Mode Decomposition (BEMD), image texture enhancement, entropy and energy feature mining, as well as binary classification. The system design has been guided by feature ranking, with Student’s t-test and other statistical methods used for quality assessment. The proposed ASMD was employed to examine 600 benign and 600 DD malignant images from benchmark databases. Our classification performance assessment indicates that the combination of Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Radial Basis Function (RBF) offers a classification accuracy of greater than 97.50%. Motivated by these classification results, we also formulated a clinically relevant MI using the dominant entropy features. Our proposed index can assist dermatologists to track multiple information-bearing features, thereby increasing the confidence with which a diagnosis is given.