Classification of malignant melanoma and benign skin lesions: implementation of automatic ABCD rule

The ABCD (asymmetry, border irregularity, colour and dermoscopic structure) rule of dermoscopy is a scoring method used by dermatologists to quantify dermoscopy findings and effectively separate melanoma from benign lesions. Automatic detection of the ABCD features and separation of benign lesions from melanoma could enable earlier detection of melanoma. In this study, automatic ABCD scoring of dermoscopy lesions is implemented. Pre-processing enables automatic detection of hair using Gabor filters and lesion boundaries using geodesic active contours. Algorithms are implemented to extract the characteristics of ABCD attributes. Methods used here combine existing methods with novel methods to detect colour asymmetry and dermoscopic structures. To classify lesions as melanoma or benign nevus, the total dermoscopy score is calculated. The experimental results, using 200 dermoscopic images, where 80 are malignant melanomas and 120 benign lesions, show that the algorithm achieves 91.25% sensitivity of 91.25 and 95.83% specificity. This is comparable to the 92.8% sensitivity and 90.3% specificity reported for human implementation of the ABCD rule. The experimental results show that the extracted features can be used to build a promising classifier for melanoma detection.