Skin Lesion Segmentation Method for Dermoscopy Images Using Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm

The occurrence rates of melanoma are rising rapidly, which are resulting in higher death rates. However, if the melanoma is diagnosed in Phase I, the survival rates increase. The segmentation of the melanoma is one of the largest tasks to undertake and achieve when considering both beneath and over the segmentation. In this work, a new approach based on the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is proposed for the detection of melanoma from digital images. This method is simple, fast, flexible, and requires fewer parameters compared with other algorithms. The proposed approach is applied on the PH2, ISBI 2016 challenge, the ISBI 2017 challenge, and Dermis datasets. These bases contained images are affected by different abnormalities. The formation of the databases consists of images collected from different sources; they are bases with different types of resolution, lighting, etc., so in the first step, the noise was removed from the images by using morphological filtering. In the next step, the ABC algorithm is used to find the optimum threshold value for the melanoma detection. The proposed approach achieved good results in the conditions of high specificity. The experimental results suggest that the proposed method accomplished higher performance compared to the ground truth images supported by a Dermatologist. For the melanoma detection, the method achieved an average accuracy and Jaccard’s coefficient in the range of 95.24–97.61%, and 83.56–85.25% in these four databases. To show the robustness of this work, the results were compared to existing methods in the literature for melanoma detection. High values for estimation performance confirmed that the proposed melanoma detection is better than other algorithms, which demonstrates the highly differential power of the newly introduced features.