Skin cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer worldwide and its early detection its key to achieve an effective treatment of the lesion. Commonly, skin cancer diagnosis is based on dermatologist expertise and pathological assessment of biopsies. Although there are diagnosis aid systems based on morphological processing algorithms using conventional imaging, currently, these systems have reached their limit and are not able to outperform dermatologists. In this sense, hyperspectral (HS) imaging (HSI) arises as a new non-invasive technology able to facilitate the detection and classification of pigmented skin lesions (PSLs), employing the spectral properties of the captured sample within and beyond the human eye capabilities. This paper presents a research carried out to develop a dermatological acquisition system based on HSI, employing 125 spectral bands captured between 450 and 950 nm. A database composed of 76 HS PSL images from 61 patients was obtained and labeled and classified into benign and malignant classes. A processing framework is proposed for the automatic identification and classification of the PSL based on a combination of unsupervised and supervised algorithms. Sensitivity and specificity results of 87.5% and 100%, respectively, were obtained in the discrimination of malignant and benign PSLs. This preliminary study demonstrates, as a proof-of-concept, the potential of HSI technology to assist dermatologists in the discrimination of benign and malignant PSLs during clinical routine practice using a real-time and non-invasive hand-held device.

Cancer originates from the uncontrolled growth of healthy cells into a mass. Chromophores, such as hemoglobin and melanin, characterize skin spectral properties, allowing the classification of lesions into different etiologies. Hyperspectral imaging systems gather skin-reflected and transmitted light into several wavelength ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, enabling potential skin-lesion differentiation through machine learning algorithms. Challenged by data availability and tiny inter and intra-tumoral variability, here we introduce a pipeline based on deep neural networks to diagnose hyperspectral skin cancer images, targeting a handheld device equipped with a low-power graphical processing unit for routine clinical testing. Enhanced by data augmentation, transfer learning, and hyperparameter tuning, the proposed architectures aim to meet and improve the well-known dermatologist-level detection performances concerning both benign-malignant and multiclass classification tasks, being able to diagnose hyperspectral data considering real-time constraints. Experiments show 87% sensitivity and 88% specificity for benign-malignant classification and specificity above 80% for the multiclass scenario. AUC measurements suggest classification performance improvement above 90% with adequate thresholding. Concerning binary segmentation, we measured skin DICE and IOU higher than 90%. We estimated 1.21 s, at most, consuming 5 Watts to segment the epidermal lesions with the U-Net++ architecture, meeting the imposed time limit. Hence, we can diagnose hyperspectral epidermal data assuming real-time constraints.

Blanca Mompeó-Corredera, Pablo Hernández-Morera, Irene Castaño-González, María del Pino Quintana-Montesdeoca, Natalia Mederos-Real. Anat Cell Biol 2022;55:330-40. https://doi.org/10.5115/acb.22.072

Well-annotated datasets are fundamental for developing robust artificial intelligence models, particularly in medical fields. Many existing skin lesion datasets have limitations in image diversity (including only clinical or dermoscopic images) or metadata, which hinder their utility for mimicking real-world clinical practice. The purpose of the MCR-SL dataset is to introduce a new, meticulously curated dataset that addresses these limitations. The MCR-SL dataset was collected from 60 subjects at the University Hospital of North Norway and comprises 779 clinical images and 1352 dermoscopic images of 240 unique lesions. The lesion types included are nevus, seborrheic keratosis, basal cell carcinoma, actinic keratosis, atypical nevus, melanoma, squamous cell carcinoma, angioma, and dermatofibroma. Labels were established by combining the consensus of a panel of four dermatologists with histopathology reports for the 29 excised lesions, with the latter serving as the gold standard. The resulting dataset provides a comprehensive resource with clinical and dermoscopic images and rich clinical context, ensuring a high level of clinical relevance, surpassing many existing resources in that matter. The MCR-SL dataset provides a holistic and reliable foundation for validating artificial intelligence models, enabling a more nuanced and clinically relevant approach to automated skin lesion diagnosis that mirrors real-world clinical practice.

This paper shows new contributions in the detection of skin cancer, where we present the use of a customized hyperspectral system that captures images in the spectral range from 450 to 950 nm. By choosing a 7 × 7 sub-image of each channel in the hyperspectral image (HSI) and then taking the mean and standard deviation of these sub-images, we were able to make fits of the resulting curves. These fitted curves had certain characteristics, which then served as a basis of classification. The most distinct fit was for the melanoma pigmented skin lesions (PSLs), which is also the most aggressive malignant cancer. Furthermore, we were able to classify the other PSLs in malignant and benign classes. This gives us a rather complete classification method for PSLs with a novel perspective of the classification procedure by exploiting the variability of each channel in the HSI.

Intro_obj: El pioderma gangrenoso es una rara enfermedad cutánea ulcerada no infecciosa, perteneciente a las dermatosis neutrofílicas. Su etiopatogenia no está bien definida hasta el momento, barajándose un mecanismo inmunológico. La localización mamaria de la afectación es inusual, apareciendo tras cirugía en la mayoría de casos en relación con el fenómeno de patergia, pero también puede ser de aparición espontánea. Presentamos un caso de paciente con carcinoma de mama izquierda sometida a mastectomía radical con reconstrucción que desarrolla un pioderma gangrenoso bilateral postquirúrgico. Se diagnosticó erróneamente como dehiscencia de herida quirúrgica, procediéndose a múltiples desbridamientos que exacerbaron el problema y retrasaron el diagnóstico más de un año. Tras múltiples tratamientos, se decide inicio de terapia con infliximab debido a la refractariedad del proceso, evolucionando satisfactoriamente. La presentación de este caso tiene como objetivo el reconocimiento y abordaje precoz de esta entidad para aprender a prevenir su morbilidad física y psicológica.