Content-Based Medical Image Retrieval System for Skin Melanoma Diagnosis Based on Optimized Pair-Wise Comparison Approach.

Abstract

Medical image analysis for perfect diagnosis of disease has become a very challenging task. Due to improper diagnosis, required medical treatment may be skipped. Proper diagnosis is needed as suspected lesions could be missed by the physician's eye. Hence, this problem can be settled up by better means with the investigation of similar case studies present in the healthcare database. In this context, this paper substantiates an assistive system that would help dermatologists for accurate identification of 23 different kinds of melanoma. For this, 2300 dermoscopic images were used to train the skin-melanoma similar image search system. The proposed system uses feature extraction by assigning dynamic weights to the low-level features based on the individual characteristics of the searched images. Optimal weights are obtained by the newly proposed optimized pair-wise comparison (OPWC) approach. The uniqueness of the proposed approach is that it provides the dynamic weights to the features of the searched image instead of applying static weights. The proposed approach is supported by analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and meta-heuristic optimization algorithms such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), JAYA, genetic algorithm (GA), and gray wolf optimization (GWO). The proposed approach has been tested with images of 23 classes of melanoma and achieved significant precision and recall. Thus, this approach of skin melanoma image search can be used as an expert assistive system to help dermatologists/physicians for accurate identification of different types of melanomas.