Abstract (EN):
Skin cancer has become one of the most frequent forms of cancer nowadays;
its high prevalence has attracted many studies towards the causes and treatments
in the recent years. However, the current practice of detecting skin cancers
is fairly subjective and may suffer from diagnostic errors. In order to solve this
problem, an effective computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system is urgently demanded.
Such system can provide an objective source to help the dermatologist
improve the diagnostic accuracy. Such an automated system aims to detect the
skin lesions on the acquired images and then analyzes whether those lesions are
benign or malignant. The usual computational procedure is composed of three
steps: image segmentation, feature extraction, and classification. Among these
steps, the segmentation has deterministic influences to the later quantitative analysis
and classification; however, due to the complicated appearance of skin lesions
in the images, correct segmentation of their boundaries is very challenging. Many
algorithms have been proposed to fulfill this task, and some of them have achieved
satisfactory performances. Nevertheless, the performance of the existing algorithms
still needs further improvement to be accepted in clinical practice.
This paper will review these algorithms and summarize their trends of the development;
algorithms focused in this work contain both the ones for dermoscopic
images and the ones for macroscopic images. Advantages and disadvantages of
each algorithm will be discussed; and possible techniques that can be used for improvement
will be proposed. Open image database will be used for testing and for
the illustration and comparisons among the different algorithms.
Language:
English
Type (Professor's evaluation):
Scientific
Contact:
www.fe.up.pt/~tavares
No. of pages:
2
License type: