CNN segmentation of skin melanoma in pre-processed dermoscopy images

Abstract

Using medical data to improve diagnosis accuracy has recently become common practice in hospitals. A modern computing environment has enabled real-time diagnosis of medical data using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). To extract and evaluate skin melanoma recorded with digital dermatoscopy images (DDI), we developed a CNN segmentation framework. In this proposal, four phases are proposed: (i) DDI collection and resizing, (ii) DDI enhancement using pre-processing techniques, (iii) CNN segmentation for lesion extraction, (v) Comparing the extracted sections to the ground truth images, and (v) Verifying whether the framework is valid. Using DDI pre-processed with (i) Traditional procedures, (ii) Otsu’s thresholding, (iii) Kapur’s thresholding, and (iv) Fuzzy-Tsallis thresholding, this proposal examines the different CNN segmentation schemes presented in the literature. For mining skin lesions, the Moth-Flame Algorithm (MFA) combined with tri-level thresholding achieves an optimal threshold for the DDI. With Fuzzy-Tsallis thresholding images, the VGG-UNet performs better than the alternatives. This framework helps to achieve better values of Jaccard (88.47±2.13%), Dice (93.08±1.17%), and Accuracy (98.64±0.71%) on the chosen DDI database.