Machine learning based skin lesion segmentation method with novel borders and hair removal techniques

PLoS One. 2022 Nov 10;17(11):e0275781. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0275781. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

The effective segmentation of lesion(s) from dermoscopic skin images assists the Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems in improving the diagnosing rate of skin cancer. The results of the existing skin lesion segmentation techniques are not up to the mark for dermoscopic images with artifacts like varying size corner borders with color similar to lesion(s) and/or hairs having low contrast with surrounding background. To improve the results of the existing skin lesion segmentation techniques for such kinds of dermoscopic images, an effective skin lesion segmentation method is proposed in this research work. The proposed method searches for the presence of corner borders in the given dermoscopc image and removes them if found otherwise it starts searching for the presence of hairs on it and eliminate them if present. Next, it enhances the resultant image using state-of-the-art image enhancement method and segments lesion from it using machine learning technique namely, GrabCut method. The proposed method was tested on PH2 and ISIC 2018 datasets containing 200 images each and its accuracy was measured with two evaluation metrics, i.e., Jaccard index, and Dice index. The evaluation results show that our proposed skin lesion segmentation method obtained Jaccard Index of 0.77, 0.80 and Dice index of 0.87, 0.82 values on PH2, and ISIC2018 datasets, respectively, which are better than state-of-the-art skin lesion segmentation techniques.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Dermoscopy / methods
  • Hair Removal*
  • Humans
  • Machine Learning
  • Melanoma* / pathology
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Skin Diseases* / diagnostic imaging
  • Skin Neoplasms* / pathology

Grants and funding

Deanship of Scientific Research at King Khalid University for funding this work under grant number (GRP/125/43). Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University Researchers Supporting Project number (PNURSP2022R203), Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. ‎Deanship of Scientific Research at Umm Al-Qura University ‎for supporting this work by Grant Code: (22UQU4310373DSR013). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.