Assessment of dots and globules in dermoscopic color images as one of the 7-point check list criteria

Skin cancer is the most commonly diagnosed type of cancer in all people, regardless of age, gender, or race. One of the most common malignant skin cancer is melanoma which is a dangerous proliferation of melanocytes. In the last several years an increasing melanoma incidence rate has been observed worldwide, and the diagnosis and deaths are increasing faster than those of any other skin cancer. The presence or absence of irregular dots and globules is one of the most important dermoscopic criteria for the diagnosis of malignant melanoma. In this paper we propose a new approach to the assessment of dots and globules irregularity of the pigmented skin lesion. We describe a complex algorithm containing following steps: image enhancement, hair removal, lesion segmentation, dots and globules detection as well as irregularity calculation. The algorithm has been tested on a database of 100 dermoscopic images. Compared to state-of-the-art, we obtain improved detection and classification accuracy.