Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Melanoma Using Border- and Wavelet-Based Texture Analysis

This paper presents a novel computer-aided diagnosis system for melanoma. The novelty lies in the optimized selection and integration of features derived from textural, border-based, and geometrical properties of the melanoma lesion. The texture features are derived from using wavelet-decomposition, the border features are derived from constructing a boundary-series model of the lesion border and analyzing it in spatial and frequency domains, and the geometry features are derived from shape indexes. The optimized selection of features is achieved by using the gain-ratio method, which is shown to be computationally efficient for melanoma diagnosis application. Classification is done through the use of four classifiers; namely, support vector machine, random forest, logistic model tree, and hidden naive Bayes. The proposed diagnostic system is applied on a set of 289 dermoscopy images (114 malignant, 175 benign) partitioned into train, validation, and test image sets. The system achieves an accuracy of 91.26% and area under curve value of 0.937, when 23 features are used. Other important findings include 1) the clear advantage gained in complementing texture with border and geometry features, compared to using texture information only, and 2) higher contribution of texture features than border-based features in the optimized feature set.