AUTOMATED DIAGNOSIS OF SKIN CANCER USING DIGITAL IMAGE PROCESSING AND MIXTURE-OF-EXPERTS

Abstract

The incidence of malignant melanoma, the most lethal form of skin cancers, has risen rapidly during the last decades. Fortunately, if detected early, even malignant melanoma can be treated successfully. Thus, in recent years, methods for automated detection and diagnosis of skin cancer, particulary malignant melanoma, have elicited much interest. In this paper we present an artificial neural network approach for the classification of skin lesions. Sophisticated image processing, feature extraction, pattern recognition and methods from the field of statistics and artificial neural networks are combined in order to achieve a fast and reliable diagnosis. With this approach, for reasonably balanced training and test sets, we are able to obtain above 90% correct classification of malignant and benign skin lesions coming from the DANAOS data collection.