Transillumination Imaging for Early Skin Cancer Detection

Frequent screening of suspicious skin pigmentations is of paramount importance since, at an early stage, skin cancer has a high cure rate and, in most cases, requires a simple treatment. In this paper, we present a new methodology for early detection of skin cancer based on the analysis of a pair of cross-polarization and side-transillumination images to examine surface pigmentation and vascularization characteristics of a lesion. Initially, the two images are automatically segmented by three separate procedures, and then the most accurate results are selected by a scoring stage. Finally, classification of the lesion as malignant or benign is accomplished by measuring the amount of hypervascularity around the pigmented area. When applied to a set of skin lesions, the two-stage methodology provided a 93.3% success rate of correct image segmentation, and it was able to classify correctly lesions as malignant or benign with 86.9% accuracy. The automatic segmentation procedure was validated against expert manual segmentation, whereas the final lesion classification was validated against findings from pathology. These results provide strong support for the importance of transillumination imaging in the early detection of skin cancer. Project supported in part by NIH grant 2R42CA076759-02; MD Anderson Cancer Center, Health Science Center at Houston; TransLite.