SCALED CONJUGATE GRADIENT BASED DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATED DIAGNOSIS OF SKIN CANCER

摘要

Melanoma is the most deathful form of skin cancer but early diagnosis can ensure a high rate of survival. Early diagnosis is one of the greatest challenges due to lack of experience of general practitioners (GPs). This paper presents a clinical decision support system designed for the use of general practitioners, aiming to save time and resources in the diagnostic process. Segmentation, pattern recognition, and lesion detection are the important steps in the proposed decision support system. The system analyses the images to extract the affected area using a novel proposed segmentation method. It determinates the underlying features which indicate the difference between melanoma and benign images and makes a decision. Considering the efficiency of neural networks in classification of complex data, scaled conjugate gradient based neural network is used for classification. The presented work also considers analyzed performance of other efficient neural network training algorithms on the specific skin lesion diagnostic problem and discussed the corresponding findings. The best diagnostic rates obtained through the proposed decision support system are around 92%.