DMpDP: a Diagnostic Multiple-patient DermoFeature Profile store-and-forward teledermoscopy system.

Telehealth demand is rapidly growing along with the necessity of providing wide-scale services covering multiple patients at the same time. In this work, the development of a store-and-forward (SAF) teledermoscopy system was considered. The dermoFeatures profile (DP) was proposed to decrease the size of the original dermoscopy image using its most significant features in the form of a newly generated diagonal alignment to generate a small-sized image DP, which is based on the extraction of a weighted intensity-difference frequency (WIDF) features along with morphological features (MOFs). These DPs were assembled to establish a Diagnostic Multiple-patient DermoFeature Profile (DMpDP). Different arrangements are proposed, namely the horizontally aligned, the diagonal-based, and the sequential-based DMpDPs to support the SAF systems. The DMpDPs are then embedded in a recorded patient-information signal (RPS) using a weight factor ß to boost the transmitted patient-information signal. The effect of the different transform domains, ß values, and number of DPs within the DMpDP were investigated in terms of the diagnostic classification accuracy at the receiver based on the extracted DPs, along with the recorded signal quality evaluation metrics of the recovered RPS. The sequential-based DMpDP achieved the highest classification accuracy, under - 5 dB additive white Gaussian noise, with a realized signal-to-noise ratio of 98.79% during the transmission of 248 DPs using ß = 100, and spectral subtraction filtering.

Cascaded Hough Transform-Based Hair Mask Generation and Harmonic Inpainting for Automated Hair Removal from Dermoscopy Images.

Restoring information obstructed by hair is one of the main issues for the accurate analysis and segmentation of skin images. For retrieving pixels obstructed by hair, the proposed system converts dermoscopy images into the L*a*b* color space, then principal component analysis (PCA) is applied to produce grayscale images. Afterward, the contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) and the average filter are implemented to enhance the grayscale image. Subsequently, the binary image is generated using the iterative thresholding method. After that, the Hough transform (HT) is applied to each image block to generate the hair mask. Finally, the hair pixels are removed by harmonic inpainting. The performance of the proposed automated hair removal was evaluated by applying the proposed system to the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) dermoscopy dataset as well as to clinical images. Six performance evaluation metrics were measured, namely the mean squared error (MSE), the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the structural similarity index (SSIM), the universal quality image index (UQI), and the correlation (C). Using the clinical dataset, the system achieved MSE, PSNR, SNR, SSIM, UQI, and C values of 34.7957, 66.98, 42.39, 0.9813, 0.9801, and 0.9985, respectively. The results demonstrated that the proposed system could satisfy the medical diagnostic requirements and achieve the best performance compared to the state-of-art.

Ensemble-based bag of features for automated classification of normal and COVID-19 CXR images.

The medical and scientific communities are currently trying to treat infected patients and develop vaccines for preventing a future outbreak. In healthcare, machine learning is proven to be an efficient technology for helping to combat the COVID-19. Hospitals are now overwhelmed with the increased infections of COVID-19 cases and given patients' confidentiality and rights. It becomes hard to assemble quality medical image datasets in a timely manner. For COVID-19 diagnosis, several traditional computer-aided detection systems based on classification techniques were proposed. The bag-of-features (BoF) model has shown a promising potential in this domain. Thus, this work developed an ensemble-based BoF classification system for the COVID-19 detection. In this model, we proposed ensemble at the classification step of the BoF. The proposed system was evaluated and compared to different classification systems for different number of visual words to evaluate their effect on the classification efficiency. The results proved the superiority of the proposed ensemble-based BoF for the classification of normal and COVID19 chest X-ray (CXR) images compared to other classifiers.

An embedded novel compact feature profile image in speech signal for teledermoscopy system.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Teledermoscopy is a promising telemedicine service for remote diagnosis and treatment of skin diseases using dermoscopy images. It requires high quality transmission services, efficient utilization of channel bandwidth, effective storage, and security. Thus, this work develops an improved teledermoscopy system that guarantees the efficient and secure transmission of the dermoscopy images. It proposed a novel feature-based secure diagnostic system that supports the automated classification of malignant melanoma and benign nevus at the receiver side (i.e. medical facility). METHODS: To overcome the transmission of the original dermoscopy images having large size, a novel representation of the dermoscopy images is proposed, namely the compact feature profile (CFP). The proposed CFP represents the dermoscopy image only using its significant features. For security purpose, the CFP is embedded as a watermark in a speech signal using singular value decomposition (SVD) watermarking at the transmitter. Then, the de-embedding/reconstruction process is performed at the receiver end using a proposed modified SVD technique. Finally, the extracted CFP is fed into a classifier for diagnosis at the receiver. To evaluate the robustness of the proposed system, an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) attack was employed during the transmission process. To improve the immunity against the AWGN attack, a novel speech signal weight factor is proposed at the watermarking process. Moreover, a compensation factor is calculated at the training phase to compensate the effect of the channel AWGN attack at the receiver. In addition, the superior transform domain and embedding positions of the CFP in the speech signal were studied. RESULTS: The experimental results established that the proposed CFP diagnostic system achieved high classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and F-measure for classifying the two skin cancer classes with the presence of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) ranging from 10 to 25 dB. CONCLUSION: This work established that the newly proposed CFP watermarked in speech signal using the DWT-based modified SVD followed by single-level decomposition Db1 with hard thresholding wavelet denoising achieved efficient diagnostic teledermoscopy system.

A novel cumulative level difference mean based GLDM and modified ABCD features ranked using eigenvector centrality approach for four skin lesion types classification.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Melanoma is one of the major death causes while basal cell carcinoma (BCC) is the utmost incident skin lesion type. At their early stages, medical experts may be confused between both types with benign nevus and pigmented benign keratoses (BKL). This inspired the current study to develop an accurate automated, user-friendly skin lesion identification system. METHODS: The current work targets a novel discrimination technique of four pre-mentioned skin lesion classes. A novel proposed texture feature, named cumulative level-difference mean (CLDM) based on the gray-level difference method (GLDM) is extracted. The asymmetry, border irregularity, color variation and diameter are summed up as the ABCD rule feature vector is originally used to classify the melanoma from benign lesions. The proposed method improved the ABCD rule to also classify BCC and BKL by using the proposed modified-ABCD feature vector. In the modified set of ABCD features, each border feature, such as compact index, fractal dimension, and edge abruptness is considered a separate feature. Then, the composite feature vector having the pre-mentioned features is ranked using the Eigenvector Centrality (ECFS) feature ranking method. The ranked features are then classified by a cubic support vector machine for different numbers of selected features. RESULTS: The proposed CLDM texture features combined with the ranked ABCD features achieved outstanding performance to classify the four targeted classes (melanoma, BCC, nevi and BKL). The results report 100% outstanding performance of the sensitivity, accuracy and specificity per each class compared to other features when using the highest seven ranked features. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed system established that Melanoma, BCC, nevus and BKL are efficiently classified using cubic SVM with the new feature set. In addition, the comparative studies proved the superiority of the cubic SVM to classify the four classes.

Combined empirical mode decomposition and texture features for skin lesion classification using quadratic support vector machine.

PURPOSE: Basal cell carcinoma is one of the most common malignant skin lesions. Automated lesion identification and classification using image processing techniques is highly required to reduce the diagnosis errors. METHODS: In this study, a novel technique is applied to classify skin lesion images into two classes, namely the malignant Basal cell carcinoma and the benign nevus. A hybrid combination of bi-dimensional empirical mode decomposition and gray-level difference method features is proposed after hair removal. The combined features are further classified using quadratic support vector machine (Q-SVM). RESULTS: The proposed system has achieved outstanding performance of 100% accuracy, sensitivity and specificity compared to other support vector machine procedures as well as with different extracted features. CONCLUSION: Basal Cell Carcinoma is effectively classified using Q-SVM with the proposed combined features.