Melanoma detection algorithm based on feature fusion

• Published in: 2015 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) Vol. 2015; pp. 2653 - 2656
• Main Authors: Barata, Catarina, Emre Celebi, M., Marques, Jorge S.
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.08.2015
• Subjects: Algorithms; Design automation; Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted; Feature extraction; Histograms; Humans; Image color analysis; Lesions; Malignant tumors; Melanoma; Training
• ISSN: 1094-687X; 1557-170X
• DOI: 10.1109/EMBC.2015.7318937

A Computer Aided-Diagnosis (CAD) System for melanoma diagnosis usually makes use of different types of features to characterize the lesions. The features are often combined into a single vector that can belong to a high dimensional space (early fusion). However, it is not clear if this is the optimal strategy and works on other fields have shown that early fusion has some limitations. In this work, we address this issue and investigate which is the best approach to combine different features comparing early and late fusion. Experiments carried on the datasets PH2 (single source) and EDRA (multi source) show that late fusion performs better, leading to classification scores of Sensitivity = 98% and Specificity = 90% (PH 2 ) and Sensitivity = 83% and Specificity = 76% (EDRA).