Genetic programming for skin cancer detection in dermoscopic images

Abstract

Development of an effective skin cancer detection system can greatly assist the dermatologist while significantly increasing the survival rate of the patient. To deal with melanoma detection, knowledge of dermatology can be combined with computer vision techniques to evolve better solutions. Image classification can significantly help in diagnosing the disease by accurately identifying the morphological structures of skin lesions responsible for developing cancer. Genetic Programming (GP), an emerging Evolutionary Computation technique, has the potential to evolve better solutions for image classification problems compared to many existing methods. In this paper, GP has been utilized to automatically evolve a classifier for skin cancer detection and also analysed GP as a feature selection method. For combining knowledge of dermatology and computer vision techniques, GP has been given domain specific features provided by the dermatologists as well as Local Binary Pattern features extracted from the dermoscopic images. The results have shown that GP has significantly outperformed or achieved comparable performance compared to the existing methods for skin cancer detection.