Abstract
Advisors: Oge Marques (Florida Atlantic University) and Xavier Giro-i-Nieto (UPC)
The recent emergence of machine learning and deep learning methods for medical image analysis has enabled the development of intelligent medical imaging-based diagnosis systems that can assist physicians in making better decisions about a patient’s health. In particular, skin imaging is a field where these new methods can be applied with a high rate of success.
This thesis focuses on the problem of automatic skin lesion detection, particularly on melanoma detection, by applying semantic segmentation and classification from dermoscopic images using a deep learning based approach. For the first problem, a U-Net convolutional neural network architecture is applied for an accurate extraction of the lesion region. For the second problem, the current model performs a binary classification (benign versus malignant) that can be used for early melanoma detection. The model is general enough to be extended to multi-class skin lesion classification. The proposed solution is built around the VGG-Net ConvNet architecture and uses the transfer learning paradigm. Finally, this work performs a comparative evaluation of classification alone (using the entire image) against a combination of the two approaches (segmentation followed by classification) in order to assess which of them achieves better classification results.
