Abstract:
Laser profilometry offers new possibilities to improve non-invasive tumor diagnostics
in dermatology. In this paper, a new approach to computer-supported analysis and interpretation
of high-resolution skin-surface profiles of melanomas and nevocellular nevi is presented.
Image analysis methods are used to describe the profile‘s structures by texture parameters
based on co-occurrence matrices, features extracted from the Fourier power spectrum,
and fractal features. Different feature selection strategies, including genetic algorithms,
are applied to determine the best possible subsets of features for the classification
task. Several architectures of multilayer perceptrons with error back-propagation
as learning paradigm are trained for the automatic recognition of melanomas and nevi.
Furthermore, network-pruning algorithms are applied to optimize the network topology.
In the study, the best neural classifier showed an error rate of 4.5% and was obtained
after network pruning. The smallest error rate in all, of 2.3%, was achieved with
nearest neighbor classification.
Keywords:
Laser Profilometry - Image Analysis - Feature Selection - Pattern Recognition - Artificial
Neural Networks