PSO-SVM hybrid system for melanoma detection from histo-pathological images

Abstract

This paper introduces an automated system for skin cancer (melanoma) detection from Histo-pathological images sampled from microscopic slides of skin biopsy. The proposed system is a hybrid system based on Particle Swarm Optimization and Support Vector Machine (PSO-SVM). The features used are extracted from the grayscale image histogram, the co-occurrence matrix and the energy of the wavelet coefficients resulting from the wavelet packet decomposition. The PSO-SVM system selects the best feature set and the best values for the SVM parameters (C and γ) that optimize the performance of the SVM classifier.   The system performance is tested on a real dataset obtained from the Southern Pathology Laboratory in Wollongong NSW, Australia. Evaluation results show a classification accuracy of 87.13%, a sensitivity of 94.1% and a specificity of 80.22%.The sensitivity and specificity results are comparable to those obtained by dermatologists.