Automatic boundary detection and symmetry calculation in dermoscopy images of skin lesions

This paper develops an approach and tool that automatically extracts skin lesion´s boundary used for symmetry and area calculation. An image enhancement approach prepares every image for active contour (AC) evolution. Further, the AC automatically extracts the lesion´s boundary used to measure symmetry applying minimal boundary box. Next, the lesion´s area is calculated. Thus, the lesions are mapped as points onto area - symmetry 2D space to determine the distribution of the lesions with cancer. To validate the theoretical concepts experiments were performed with 51 skin lesion images. A statistics measures the accuracy of boundary extraction with respect to a ground truth. The advantages, disadvantages and the contribution of this study are reported at the end of the paper.