Epidemiology and Health Services Research Diagnostic and neural analysis of skin cancer (DANAOS). A multicentre study for collection and computer-aided analysis of data from pigmented skin lesions using digital dermoscopy

Summary Background Early detection of melanomas by means of diverse screening campaigns is an important step towards a reduction in mortality. Computer-aided analysis of digital images obtained by dermoscopy has been reported to be an accurate, practical and time-saving tool for the evaluation of pigmented skin lesions (PSLs). A prototype for the computer-aided diagnosis of PSLs using artificial neural networks (NNs) has recently been developed: diagnostic and neural analysis of skin cancer (DANAOS). Objectives To demonstrate the accuracy of PSL diagnosis by the DANAOS expert system, a multicentre study on a diverse multinational population was conducted. Methods A calibrated camera system was developed and used to collect images of PSLs in a multicentre study in 13 dermatology centres in nine European countries. The dataset was used to train an NN expert system for the computer-aided diagnosis of melanoma. We analysed different aspects of the data collection and its influence on the performance of the expert system. The NN expert system was trained with a dataset of 2218 dermoscopic images of PSLs. Results The resulting expert system showed a performance similar to that of dermatologists as published in the literature. The performance depended on the size and quality of the database and its selection.