Texture analysis based automated decision support system for classification of skin cancer using SA-SVM

Abstract

Early diagnosis of skin cancer is one of the greatest challenges due to lack of experience of general practitioners (GPs). This paper presents a clinical decision support system aimed to save lives, time and resources in the early diagnostic process. Segmentation, feature extraction, and lesion classification are the important steps in the proposed system. The system analyses the images to extract the affected area using a novel proposed segmentation method H-FCMLS. A set of 45 texture based features is used. These underlying features which indicate the difference between melanoma and benign images are obtained through specialized texture analysis methods. For classification purpose, selfadvising SVM is adapted which showed improved classification rate as compared to standard SVM. The diagnostic accuracy obtained through the proposed system is around 90% with sensitivity 91% and specificity 89%.