Combination of 3D skin surface texture features and 2D ABCD features for improved melanoma diagnosis

Quantifying Dermatochalasis Using 3-Dimensional Photogrammetry

BACKGROUND

Creating an appropriate treatment plan for patients with dermatochalasis requires careful investigation of the periocular region. Utilizing photographic documentation can assist physicians in conducting preoperative analysis and managing expectations regarding surgical outcomes.

OBJECTIVES

This study aimed to quantify the periocular characteristics of dermatochalasis patients using standardized 3D imaging and to compare age and sex-related changes in periocular features.

METHODS

In this cross-sectional study, we recruited 145 Caucasian patients with periocular dermatochalasis, comprising 48 men and 97 women, aged between 35 and 91 years. Standardized three-dimensional facial photographs were taken using the 3D Imaging system VECTRA M3. Linear dimensions, curve length, angle, indices, and sizes were measured and analyzed, including palpebral fissure height (PFH), palpebral fissure width (PFW), upper lid fold-palpebral margin distance (FPD), upper palpebral margin length (UPML), lower palpebral margin length (LPML), canthal tilt (CT), palpebral fissure index (PFI), upper eyelid area, and ocular surface area.

RESULTS

In the female group, the left-side PFH was slightly larger than the right-side PFH (P = 0.023), but the difference was less than 1mm. The corresponding PFI also showed a difference in the female group (P = 0.009). Statistically significant differences were shown in genders for specific parameters, except PFI (P = 0.251) and CT (P = 0.098). Among males, PFW (R = -0.523, p < 0.001) and LPML (R = -0.514, P = 0.264) decreased moderately with age. The correlation between UPML and age was weak (R = -0.367, P = 0.010). Similarly, among females, moderate correlations were found between age and PFW (R = -0.566, P < 0.001) and LPML (R = -0.537, P < 0.001). Additionally, PFH (R = -0.315, P = 0.002), UPML (R = -0.381, P < 0.001), and ocular surface area (R = -0.457, P < 0.001) showed weak correlations with age.

CONCLUSIONS

The study found that dermatochalasis usually affects both eyes simultaneously, and age is a significant factor in the morphological changes of certain periocular features regardless of sex. The PFI is not influenced by age or sex. These findings may provide useful information for surgical planning and understanding age-related changes in the periocular area.

LEVEL OF EVIDENCE V

This journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each article. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to the Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors www.springer.com/00266 .

Image Layout and Schema Analysis of Chinese Traditional Woodblock Prints Based on Texture and Color Texture Characteristics in the Environment of Few Samples

Technology is the means by which all arts, including woodblock prints, are realized. The “kinship” with modern science and technology makes the development history of woodcut art that can also be understood as a technology history. The purpose of the texture expression produced in the creation of contemporary woodcut is to explore the rich texture expression forms made by contemporary representative painters using special material materials and tools in artistic creation, form a painting technique of personalized words, add new aesthetic meaning to art, and lay a foundation for the formation of unique style of Contemporary Art and the creation and development of woodcut texture. With the development of the times and the change of the public's aesthetic taste, the traditional pattern of printmaking needs to be properly transformed if it is to adapt to the modern humanistic environment, which also involves the importance of screen layout and pattern analysis of Chinese traditional woodcut. Based on the analysis of texture and color texture features in a few-sample environment, this paper proposes an automatic classification method for vignetting texture pictures by extracting the corresponding vignetting coefficients, and through experiments to verify that the proposed SILCO has good generalization sex. In the algorithm designed in this paper, the experiment shows that the accuracy P has a 64.7% improvement effect, and the recall r has a 67.8% performance improvement. On the whole, the experimental data show that the comprehensive classification accuracy is more than 57.4%.

An Intelligent Model for the Detection of White Blood Cells using Artificial Intelligence

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

The automatic detection and counting of white blood cells (WBCs) play a vital role in the diagnosis of hematological diseases. Computer-aided methods are prevalent in the detection of WBCs because the manual process involves several complexities. In this article, a complete automatic detection algorithm to recognize the WBCs embedded in cluttered and complicated smear images of blood is designed.

METHODS

The proposed algorithm uses the ellipse detection approach to approximate the presence of WBCs in the Blood. A newly designed artificial electric field algorithm with novel velocity and position bound (AEFA-C) is employed for this purpose. The problem of detection of WBCs is transformed into an optimization problem where the random candidate solutions (ellipses) are efficiently mapped. These candidate ellipses are mapped onto the edge map of the smear image, and a complete mapping is obtained using the AEFA-C algorithm.

RESULTS

The effectiveness of the AEFA-C based detector is tested over the 60 smear images of the blood, having all the five types of WBCs or leukocytes. The developed algorithm obtained an overall detection accuracy of 96.90%. Further, the robustness test is performed on the same dataset which justifies that the technique can handle the different noises with the detection accuracy of 90.33%. Also, the comparative study of the proposed detection algorithm with the state-of-art detection algorithms is carried out.

CONCLUSIONS

The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme for the detection of the WBCs in terms of detection accuracy, stability, and robustness and its outperformance over the state-of-art algorithms.

Nucleus and cytoplasm-based segmentation and actor-critic neural network for acute lymphocytic leukaemia detection in single cell blood smear images

Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), which is due to the malfunctioning in the bone marrow, is common among people all over the world. The haematologist suffers a lot to discriminate the presence of leukaemia in the patients using the blood smears. To overcome the inaccuracy and reliability issues, this paper proposes an automatic method of leukaemia detection, named chronological Sine Cosine Algorithm-based actor-critic neural network (Chrono-SCA-ACNN). Initially, the blood smear images are segmented using the proposed entropy-based hybrid model, from which the image-level features and statistical features are extracted from the segments. Then, the selected features are applied to the proposed classifier, which detects the leukaemia. In the proposed Chrono-SCA-ACNN, the optimal weights are selected by the proposed Chrono-SCA, which is the integration of the chronological concept in the SCA. Finally, the experimentation is performed using the ALL-IDB2 database, and the effectiveness of the proposed method over the existing methods is evaluated. From the analysis, the accuracy of the proposed method is found to be 0.99, which proves that it outperforms the existing classification methodologies. Graphical abstract Block diagram of proposed Leukaemia detection. The main aim of the paper is to segment and classify the WBCs for ALL detection in single cell blood smear images. Initially, the blood smear image is subjected to pre-processing in order to enhance the quality of the input image so as to make it effective for the further processes associated with Leukaemia detection. The pre-processed image is applied to the segmentation process that segments the cytoplasm and nucleus using the Entropy-based hybrid model. The entropy-based hybrid model is developed using the FCM and active contour to segment the cytoplasm and nucleus that is fused using the entropy. The segments are subjected to the feature extraction that extracts the statistical features and the color histogram-based features from the segments. The features are presented to the Actor-Critic Neural Network and the weights of the Neural Network (NN) are optimally tuned using the proposed Chrono-SCA. The block diagram of the proposed method of leukaemia detection is depicted in Fig. 1.

Accuracy of Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Melanoma: A Meta-analysis

IMPORTANCE

The recent advances in the field of machine learning have raised expectations that computer-aided diagnosis will become the standard for the diagnosis of melanoma.

OBJECTIVE

To critically review the current literature and compare the diagnostic accuracy of computer-aided diagnosis with that of human experts.

DATA SOURCES

The MEDLINE, arXiv, and PubMed Central databases were searched to identify eligible studies published between January 1, 2002, and December 31, 2018.

STUDY SELECTION

Studies that reported on the accuracy of automated systems for melanoma were selected. Search terms included melanoma, diagnosis, detection, computer aided, and artificial intelligence.

DATA EXTRACTION AND SYNTHESIS

Evaluation of the risk of bias was performed using the QUADAS-2 tool, and quality assessment was based on predefined criteria. Data were analyzed from February 1 to March 10, 2019.

MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES

Summary estimates of sensitivity and specificity and summary receiver operating characteristic curves were the primary outcomes.

RESULTS

The literature search yielded 1694 potentially eligible studies, of which 132 were included and 70 offered sufficient information for a quantitative analysis. Most studies came from the field of computer science. Prospective clinical studies were rare. Combining the results for automated systems gave a melanoma sensitivity of 0.74 (95% CI, 0.66-0.80) and a specificity of 0.84 (95% CI, 0.79-0.88). Sensitivity was lower in studies that used independent test sets than in those that did not (0.51; 95% CI, 0.34-0.69 vs 0.82; 95% CI, 0.77-0.86; P < .001); however, the specificity was similar (0.83; 95% CI, 0.71-0.91 vs 0.85; 95% CI, 0.80-0.88; P = .67). In comparison with dermatologists' diagnosis, computer-aided diagnosis showed similar sensitivities and a 10 percentage points lower specificity, but the difference was not statistically significant. Studies were heterogeneous and substantial risk of bias was found in all but 4 of the 70 studies included in the quantitative analysis.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE

Although the accuracy of computer-aided diagnosis for melanoma detection is comparable to that of experts, the real-world applicability of these systems is unknown and potentially limited owing to overfitting and the risk of bias of the studies at hand.

Mutual Information based hybrid model and deep learning for Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia detection in single cell blood smear images

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Due to the development in digital microscopic imaging, image processing and classification has become an interesting area for diagnostic research. Various techniques are available in the literature for the detection of Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia from the single cell blood smear images. The purpose of this work is to develop an effective method for leukemia detection.

METHODS

This work has developed deep learning based leukemia detection module from the blood smear images. Here, the detection scheme carries out pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction and classification. The segmentation is done by the proposed Mutual Information (MI) based hybrid model, which combines the segmentation results of the active contour model and fuzzy C means algorithm. Then, from the segmented images, the statistical and the Local Directional Pattern (LDP) features are extracted and provided to the proposed Chronological Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA) based Deep CNN classifier for the classification.

RESULTS

For the experimentation, the blood smear images are considered from the AA-IDB2 database and evaluated based on metrics, such as True Positive Rate (TPR), True Negative Rate (TNR), and accuracy. Simulation results reveal that the proposed Chronological SCA based Deep CNN classifier has the accuracy of 98.7%.

CONCLUSIONS

The performance of the proposed Chronological SCA-based Deep CNN classifier is compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The analysis shows that the proposed classifier has comparatively improved performance and determines the leukemia from the blood smear images.

Computer-assisted diagnosis techniques (dermoscopy and spectroscopy-based) for diagnosing skin cancer in adults

BACKGROUND

Early accurate detection of all skin cancer types is essential to guide appropriate management and to improve morbidity and survival. Melanoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) are high-risk skin cancers which have the potential to metastasise and ultimately lead to death, whereas basal cell carcinoma (BCC) is usually localised with potential to infiltrate and damage surrounding tissue. Anxiety around missing early curable cases needs to be balanced against inappropriate referral and unnecessary excision of benign lesions. Computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) systems use artificial intelligence to analyse lesion data and arrive at a diagnosis of skin cancer. When used in unreferred settings ('primary care'), CAD may assist general practitioners (GPs) or other clinicians to more appropriately triage high-risk lesions to secondary care. Used alongside clinical and dermoscopic suspicion of malignancy, CAD may reduce unnecessary excisions without missing melanoma cases.

OBJECTIVES

To determine the accuracy of CAD systems for diagnosing cutaneous invasive melanoma and atypical intraepidermal melanocytic variants, BCC or cSCC in adults, and to compare its accuracy with that of dermoscopy.

SEARCH METHODS

We undertook a comprehensive search of the following databases from inception up to August 2016: Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL); MEDLINE; Embase; CINAHL; CPCI; Zetoc; Science Citation Index; US National Institutes of Health Ongoing Trials Register; NIHR Clinical Research Network Portfolio Database; and the World Health Organization International Clinical Trials Registry Platform. We studied reference lists and published systematic review articles.

SELECTION CRITERIA

Studies of any design that evaluated CAD alone, or in comparison with dermoscopy, in adults with lesions suspicious for melanoma or BCC or cSCC, and compared with a reference standard of either histological confirmation or clinical follow-up.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS

Two review authors independently extracted all data using a standardised data extraction and quality assessment form (based on QUADAS-2). We contacted authors of included studies where information related to the target condition or diagnostic threshold were missing. We estimated summary sensitivities and specificities separately by type of CAD system, using the bivariate hierarchical model. We compared CAD with dermoscopy using (a) all available CAD data (indirect comparisons), and (b) studies providing paired data for both tests (direct comparisons). We tested the contribution of human decision-making to the accuracy of CAD diagnoses in a sensitivity analysis by removing studies that gave CAD results to clinicians to guide diagnostic decision-making.

MAIN RESULTS

We included 42 studies, 24 evaluating digital dermoscopy-based CAD systems (Derm-CAD) in 23 study cohorts with 9602 lesions (1220 melanomas, at least 83 BCCs, 9 cSCCs), providing 32 datasets for Derm-CAD and seven for dermoscopy. Eighteen studies evaluated spectroscopy-based CAD (Spectro-CAD) in 16 study cohorts with 6336 lesions (934 melanomas, 163 BCC, 49 cSCCs), providing 32 datasets for Spectro-CAD and six for dermoscopy. These consisted of 15 studies using multispectral imaging (MSI), two studies using electrical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and one study using diffuse-reflectance spectroscopy. Studies were incompletely reported and at unclear to high risk of bias across all domains. Included studies inadequately address the review question, due to an abundance of low-quality studies, poor reporting, and recruitment of highly selected groups of participants.Across all CAD systems, we found considerable variation in the hardware and software technologies used, the types of classification algorithm employed, methods used to train the algorithms, and which lesion morphological features were extracted and analysed across all CAD systems, and even between studies evaluating CAD systems. Meta-analysis found CAD systems had high sensitivity for correct identification of cutaneous invasive melanoma and atypical intraepidermal melanocytic variants in highly selected populations, but with low and very variable specificity, particularly for Spectro-CAD systems. Pooled data from 22 studies estimated the sensitivity of Derm-CAD for the detection of melanoma as 90.1% (95% confidence interval (CI) 84.0% to 94.0%) and specificity as 74.3% (95% CI 63.6% to 82.7%). Pooled data from eight studies estimated the sensitivity of multispectral imaging CAD (MSI-CAD) as 92.9% (95% CI 83.7% to 97.1%) and specificity as 43.6% (95% CI 24.8% to 64.5%). When applied to a hypothetical population of 1000 lesions at the mean observed melanoma prevalence of 20%, Derm-CAD would miss 20 melanomas and would lead to 206 false-positive results for melanoma. MSI-CAD would miss 14 melanomas and would lead to 451 false diagnoses for melanoma. Preliminary findings suggest CAD systems are at least as sensitive as assessment of dermoscopic images for the diagnosis of invasive melanoma and atypical intraepidermal melanocytic variants. We are unable to make summary statements about the use of CAD in unreferred populations, or its accuracy in detecting keratinocyte cancers, or its use in any setting as a diagnostic aid, because of the paucity of studies.

AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS

In highly selected patient populations all CAD types demonstrate high sensitivity, and could prove useful as a back-up for specialist diagnosis to assist in minimising the risk of missing melanomas. However, the evidence base is currently too poor to understand whether CAD system outputs translate to different clinical decision-making in practice. Insufficient data are available on the use of CAD in community settings, or for the detection of keratinocyte cancers. The evidence base for individual systems is too limited to draw conclusions on which might be preferred for practice. Prospective comparative studies are required that evaluate the use of already evaluated CAD systems as diagnostic aids, by comparison to face-to-face dermoscopy, and in participant populations that are representative of those in which the test would be used in practice.