Building of Readable Decision Trees for Automated Melanoma Discrimination

Even expert dermatologists cannot easily diagnose a melanoma, because its appearance is often similar to that of a nevus, in particular in its early stage. For this reason, studies of automated melanoma discrimination using image analysis have been conducted. However, no systematic studies exist that offer grounds for the discrimination result in a readable form. In this paper, we propose an automated melanoma discrimination system that it is capable of providing not only the discrimination results but also their grounds by means of utilizing a Random Forest (RF) technique. Our system was constructed based on a total of 1,148 dermoscopy images (168 melanomas and 980 nevi) and uses only their color features in order to ensure the readability of the grounds for the discrimination results. By virtue of our efficient feature selection procedure, our system provides accurate discrimination results (a sensitivity of 79.8 % and a specificity of 80.7 % with 10-fold cross-validation) under human-oriented limitations and presents the grounds for the results in an intelligible format.