Pigment network-based skin cancer detection

Diagnosing skin cancer in its early stages is a challenging task for dermatologists given the fact that the chance for a patient´s survival is higher and hence the process of analyzing skin images and making decisions should be time efficient. Therefore, diagnosing the disease using automated and computerized systems has nowadays become essential. This paper proposes an efficient system for skin cancer detection on dermoscopic images. It has been shown that the statistical characteristics of the pigment network, extracted from the dermoscopic image, could be used as efficient discriminating features for cancer detection. The proposed system has been assessed on a dataset of 200 dermoscopic images of the `Hospital Pedro Hispano´ [1] and the results of cross-validation have shown high detection accuracy.