31686 Automatic detection of blue-white veil in melanoma based on multispectral dermoscopy

Abstract

Blue-white veil (BWV) is an important feature in melanoma detection where it is present as a focal, ill-defined area. In benign lesions BWV typically has a more uniform distribution across the lesion. In this work we analyzed spectral signatures, obtained using multispectral dermoscopy, of pathology proven atypical nevi (n = 30) and melanoma (n = 119) lesions using a retrospectively collected dataset. Using AI techniques, we were able to automatically detect the BWV dermoscopic feature. When only considering darker regions in the lesions, we found a specificity in discriminating melanoma from atypical nevi based on the presence of BWV of 100% at a sensitivity of 34%. When additionally including paler regions, the sensitivity increases to 64% at a slightly reduced specificity of 95%. The main advantage of this automatic BWV detection is that it only relies on the observed spectral signature of the corresponding region of the lesion, without requiring spatial information or relative color compared with the surrounding lesion area. Furthermore, the used technique allows to exactly highlight where the BWV was detected, allowing expert review. Future work will include visual analysis by expert dermatologists of the detected BWV areas, especially since literature shows a BWV prevalence of 18.7% in nevi (and 34.9% in melanoma). The higher specificity of the automatic BWV detector may suggest that the presented technique allows to discriminate BWV correlated with benign nevi from BWV correlated with melanoma. Finally, a prospective study should be performed to prove the benefit of the presented automatic BWV detection in clinical practice.