A High-Accuracy Mathematical Morphology and Multilayer Perceptron-Based Approach for Melanoma Detection

Abstract

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), melanoma is the most severe type of skin cancer and is the leading cause of death from skin cancer worldwide. Certain features of melanoma include size, shape, color, or texture changes of a mole. In this work, a novel, robust and efficient method for the detection and classification of melanoma in simple and dermatological images is proposed. It is achieved by using HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) color space along with mathematical morphology and a Gaussian filter to detect the region of interest and estimate four descriptors: symmetry, edge, color, and size. Although these descriptors have been used for several years, the way they are computed for this proposal is one of the things that enhances the results. Subsequently, a multilayer perceptron is employed to classify between malignant and benign melanoma. Three datasets of simple and dermatological images commonly used in the literature were employed to train and evaluate the performance of the proposed method. According to k-fold cross-validation, the method outperforms three state-of-art works, achieving an accuracy of 98.5% and 98.6%, a sensitivity of 96.68% and 98.05%, and a specificity of 98.15%, and 98.01%, in simple and dermatological images, respectively. The results have proven that its use as an assistive device for the detection of melanoma would improve reliability levels compared to conventional methods.