Skin Cancer Screening

Each year more than 200.000 people develop skin cancer in germany alone¹. Therefore an affordable and reliable screening process becomes all the more important. At present detection and diagnosis of skin lesions is handled mostly manually by experienced dermatologists using a plethora of simple criteria, like the ABCDE principle².

Our goal is to develop an automatic process for diagnostic support of skin lesions based on close-up views of the patient in question. The process should perform three main tasks:

• Preprocessing and removal of irrelevant information(e.g. body hair)
• Detection and segmentation of candidate regions
• Provide diagnostic support for the located regions

Our framework incorporates different techniques from the computer-vision and machine-learning community and our own custom algorithms:

• Object removal by texture synthesis
• Supervised classification based on the boosting framework
• Automatic evaluation of diagnostic indices based on color, texture, shape and structural features
• ...

¹ Deutsche Krebshilfe
² Wikipedia: Melanoma