A Skin Lesion Semi-supervised Segmentation Method

The skin is an essential system for the human body, also the most susceptible to diseases. The diagnosis of these diseases is made mainly through dermatoscopy images, a noninvasive procedure. This paper presents a semi-automatic method that can assist the physician in monitoring the skin lesion's evolution. Our approach applies the SLICO algorithm for superpixels generation, and texture features extraction. Subsequently, the algorithm Seeded Fuzzy C-means clusters the superpixels based on marked regions made by a specialist. Finally, the images undergo a post-processing step, eliminating noise and smoothing edges. We used 1380 images from four public datasets: the PH2 and DermIs to settle the method parameters, and ISIC 2016 and ISIC 2017 to the performance evaluation. Our tests show that by marking 1% of the superpixels, our method achieves an accuracy of 96.16% in ISIC 2016 and 95.34% in ISIC 2017. According to the literature, the segmentation was considered excellent in 93.49% of the images in ISIC 2016 and on 79.44% of ISIC 2017 images.