Abstract
Skin moles and lesions can be the first signs of severe skin diseases such as cancer. This paper presents the development of an end-user device capable of capturing images, segmentation and diagnosis of moles by using the ABCD rule, which stands for analyzing moles’ parameters as: asymmetry, border, color, and diameter. These are the main mole characteristics that doctors look at, each of them having a different factor of importance, and depending on these an accurate diagnosis can be given. For the hardware, we developed a small and compact device that can be manipulated easily by anyone without knowledge of medicine, in which we considered a custom-designed 3D enclosure with two white LEDs to control the light. The device has the role of facilitating analysis of the suspicious moles regularly at home, even if only from an indicative and not from a medical point of view. The developed PC software permits the storage of the images in a local database for easy tracking and analysis in time. The image processing developed for the ABCD rule is incorporated into the PC software and tested extensively on the international PH2 database with skin melanoma images to validate our segmentation and criteria evaluation. Using the developed device, we captured mole images for patients, who also took a medical examination by a specialist using the standard dermatoscope. Therefore, we obtained our own database containing 26 images for which we have also the specialists’ diagnosis. The performance evaluation measures obtained using our device are—Accuracy: 0.92, Precision: 1.0, Recall: 0.92, F1-score: 0.96.
Highlights
The skin is the largest organ of the body [1] and represents much more than a simple covering
This paper presents the development of an end-user device capable of diagnosing and classifying moles by the ABCD rule introduced in 1985 [11,12,13], which stands for evaluating the parameters: asymmetry, border, color, and diameter
We considered for exemplification four images, two with non-cancerous moles, one with cancerous mole, and one with a possibly cancerous mole that a doctor should evaluate
Summary
The skin is the largest organ of the body [1] and represents much more than a simple covering. This camera was built as a “point-and-’shoot’ type It used a CCD (Chargecoupled-device) sensor, which consists of a panel of photosensitive diodes that capture the image data together with a storage panel that picks up the images and represents an analog-moving register. As far as dermatology is concerned, the step in developing the early diagnosis of skin cancer, and implicitly in the TBP technique, is the implementation of a more eloquent smartphone application with a user-friendly interface for high-risk moles. Total body photography has been proven to be a valuable tool that can improve the early detection of skin cancer, as it observes changes in various lesions by the compression of images taken by an analog or digital camera, a 3D system, or an increasingly present smartphone application. The end-user must connect the device to the USB port of the PC, place the opening of the 3D enclosure on the mole of interest, capture the image of the mole by a simple push of a button, and open the file in the PC software
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