Segmentation of skin lesions in dermoscopy images using fuzzy classification of pixels and histogram thresholding

Background and objective: To ensure proper functioning of a Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system for melanoma detection in dermoscopy images, it is important to accurately detect the border of the lesion. This paper proposes a method developed by the authors to address this problem. Methods: The algorithm for segmentation of skin lesions in dermoscopy images is based on fuzzy classification of pixels and subsequent histogram thresholding. Results: This method participated in the 2016 and 2017 ISBI (International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging) Challenges, hosted by the ISIC (International Skin Imaging Collaboration). It was tested against two public databases containing 379 and 600 images respectively, and compared using the same defined metrics (Accuracy, Dice Coefficient, Jaccard Index, Sensitivity and Specificity) with the rest of participating state-of-the-art work, obtaining good results: (0.934, 0.869, 0.791, 0.870 and 0.978) and (0.884, 0.760, 0.665, 0.869 and 0.923) respectively, ranking 9th and 15th out of a total of 21 and 28 participants respectively using the Jaccard Index (which was the indicator used as a basis for ranking) and the 1st in the 2017 Challenge using the Sensitivity. Conclusion: The method has been proven to be robust and reliable. It's main contribution is the very design of the algorithm, highly innovative, which could also be used to deal with other segmentation problems of a similar nature. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.