Melanoma is considered the most serious type of skin cancer. All over the world, the mortality rate is much high for melanoma in contrast with other cancer. There are various computer-aided solutions proposed to correctly identify melanoma cancer. However, the difficult visual appearance of the nevus makes it very difficult to design a reliable Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system for accurate melanoma detection. Existing systems either uses traditional machine learning models and focus on handpicked suitable features or uses deep learning-based methods that use complete images for feature learning. The automatic and most discriminative feature extraction for skin cancer remains an important research problem that can further be used to better deep learning training. Furthermore, the availability of the limited available images also creates a problem for deep learning models. From this line of research, we propose an intelligent Region of Interest (ROI) based system to identify and discriminate melanoma with nevus cancer by using the transfer learning approach. An improved k-mean algorithm is used to extract ROIs from the images. These ROI based approach helps to identify discriminative features as the images containing only melanoma cells are used to train system. We further use a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based transfer learning model with data augmentation for ROI images of DermIS and DermQuest datasets. The proposed system gives 97.9% and 97.4% accuracy for DermIS and DermQuest respectively. The proposed ROI based transfer learning approach outperforms existing methods that use complete images for classification.
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may cause damage to the memory cells permanently, which results in the form of dementia. The diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease at an early stage is a problematic task for researchers. For this, machine learning and deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based approaches are readily available to solve various problems related to brain image data analysis. In clinical research, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is used to diagnose AD. For accurate classification of dementia stages, we need highly discriminative features obtained from MRI images. Recently advanced deep CNN-based models successfully proved their accuracy. However, due to a smaller number of image samples available in the datasets, there exist problems of over-fitting hindering the performance of deep learning approaches. In this research, we developed a Siamese convolutional neural network (SCNN) model inspired by VGG-16 (also called Oxford Net) to classify dementia stages. In our approach, we extend the insufficient and imbalanced data by using augmentation approaches. Experiments are performed on a publicly available dataset open access series of imaging studies (OASIS), by using the proposed approach, an excellent test accuracy of 99.05% is achieved for the classification of dementia stages. We compared our model with the state-of-the-art models and discovered that the proposed model outperformed the state-of-the-art models in terms of performance, efficiency, and accuracy.
Melanoma is considered a fatal type of skin cancer. However, it is sometimes hard to distinguish it from Nevus due to their identical visual appearance and symptoms. The mortality rate because of this disease is higher than all other skin related consolidated malignancies. The number of cases is growing amongst young people but if it is diagnosed at its earlier stage then the survival rates become very high. The cost and time required for the doctors to diagnose all patients for Melanoma are very high. In this research work, we propose an intelligent system to detect and distinguish Melanoma from Nevus by using state of the art image processing techniques. At first, Gaussian Filter is used for removing noise from the skin lesion of the acquired images followed by the use of improved K-mean clustering to segment out the lesion. A distinctive hybrid super feature vector is formed by the extraction of textural and color features from the lesion. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is utilized for the classification of skin cancer into melanoma and nevus. Our aim is to test the effectiveness of the proposed segmentation technique, extract the most suitable features and compare the classification results with the other techniques present in the literature. The proposed methodology is tested on DERMIS dataset having a total number of 397 skin cancer images where 146 are melanoma and 251 are nevus skin lesions. Our proposed methodology archives encouraging results having 96% accuracy.
Alzheimer’s disease effects human brain cells and results in dementia. The gradual deterioration of the brain cells results in disability of performing daily routine tasks. The treatment for this disease is still not mature enough. However, its early diagnosis may allow restraining the spread of disease. For early detection of Alzheimer’s through brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), an automated detection and classification system needs to be developed that can detect and classify the subject having dementia. These systems also need not only to classify dementia patients but to also identify the four progressing stages of dementia. The proposed system works on an efficient technique of utilizing transfer learning to classify the images by fine-tuning a pre-trained convolutional network, AlexNet. The architecture is trained and tested over the pre-processed segmented (Grey Matter, White Matter, and Cerebral Spinal Fluid) and un-segmented images for both binary and multi-class classification. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated over Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) dataset. The algorithm showed promising results by giving the best overall accuracy of 92.85% for multi-class classification of un-segmented images.
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia. It gradually increases from mild stage to severe, affecting the ability to perform common daily tasks without assistance. It is a neurodegenerative illness, presently having no specified cure. Computer-Aided Diagnostic Systems have played an important role to help physicians to identify AD. However, the diagnosis of AD into its four stages; No Dementia, Very Mild Dementia, Mild Dementia, and Moderate Dementia remains an open research area. Deep learning assisted computer-aided solutions are proved to be more useful because of their high accuracy. However, the most common problem with deep learning architecture is that large training data is required. Furthermore, the samples should be evenly distributed among the classes to avoid the class imbalance problem. The publicly available dataset (OASIS) has serious class imbalance problem. In this research, we employed a transfer learning-based technique using data augmentation for 3D Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) views from OASIS dataset. The accuracy of the proposed model utilizing a single view of the brain MRI is 98.41% while using 3D-views is 95.11%. The proposed system outperformed the existing techniques for Alzheimer disease stages.