Imaging techniques for computer-assisted diagnosis of skin-pigmented lesions

摘要

Abstract: Early diagnosis of cutaneous melanoma followed byprompt surgical excision of the lesion is, at present,the most reliable means to assure the best prognosis ofsurvival to the patient. Recent studies have shown thatonly 50% clinical accuracy in diagnosis of earlymelanoma is usually achieved by visual inspection,whereas accuracy can increase up to 90% when diagnosisis performed by experienced clinicians. For thisreason, there is increasing interest in the possibilityof new technologies to be used to assist the clinicianin performing diagnosis of melanoma. Since 1976 severalattempts have been made to set up methods toquantitatively estimate the clinical features which aresubjectively evaluated in making clinical diagnosis. Inthis paper some of these techniques are reviewedincluding photographic photometry, integrating spherespectrophotometry, multispectral imagespectrophotometry and color CCD- camera basedtechniques. The two latter image acquisition systemsseem to provide similar sensitivity and specificity indiscriminating melanoma from benign nevi. In an attemptto improve the diagnostic capability of acomputer-assisted diagnosis of melanoma, we arestudying the potential of the computer image analysisof the two different image acquisition systems. Bycombining the information derived from the imageanalysis of both methods, the reliability of acomputer-assisted diagnosis of melanoma might beenhanced. !9