Optimal set of features for accurate skin cancer diagnosis

Skin cancer is on the rise. Hence the accurate detection of cancerous lesions is of paramount importance in the treatment of this health condition. In this study, we present a computer vision framework that studies 10 skin lesion features including newly introduced morphological and texture features along with established in the literature. All features are extracted automatically from 90 lesion images. A two-class classification problem was applied to determine the most significant features of disease using three features selection methods, Support Vector Machines Recursive Feature Elimination (SVMRFE), Information Gain, and Correlation-based Feature Subset Selection. We found that the five features selected by SVMRFE provides the highest accuracy readings of 100% model, 84% leave-one-out, and 89% 10-fold cross validation (10×CV) than the other two methods. Comparing the selected features with those used by the Total Dermoscopy Score, we report consistencies, disagreements, and the contributions of the present work.