Three-phase general border detection method for dermoscopy images using non-uniform illumination correction

Background Computer-aided diagnosis of dermoscopy images has shown great promise in developing a quantitative, objective way of classifying skin lesions. An important step in the classification process is lesion segmentation. Many studies have been successful in segmenting melanocytic skin lesions (MSLs), but few have focused on non-melanocytic skin lesions (NoMSLs), as the wide variety of lesions makes accurate segmentation difficult. Methods We developed an automatic segmentation program for detecting borders of skin lesions in dermoscopy images. The method consists of a pre-processing phase, general lesion segmentation phase, including illumination correction, and bright region segmentation phase. Results We tested our method on a set of 107 NoMSLs and a set of 319 MSLs. Our method achieved precision/recall scores of 84.5% and 88.5% for NoMSLs, and 93.9% and 93.8% for MSLs, in comparison with manual extractions from four or five dermatologists. Conclusion The accuracy of our method was competitive or better than five recently published methods. Our new method is the first method for detecting borders of both non-melanocytic and melanocytic skin lesions.