title: Automatic measurement of melanoma depth of invasion in skin histopathological images.
abstract: Measurement of melanoma depth of invasion (DoI) in skin tissues is of great significance in grading the severity of skin disease and planning patient's treatment. However, accurate and automatic measurement of melanocytic tumor depth is a challenging problem mainly due to the difficulty of skin granular identification and melanoma detection. In this paper, we propose a technique for measuring melanoma DoI in microscopic images digitized from MART1 (i.e., meleanoma-associated antigen recognized by T cells) stained skin histopathological sections. The technique consists of four modules. First, skin melanoma areas are detected by combining color features with the Mahalanobis distance measure. Next, skin epidermis is segmented by a multi-thresholding method. The skin granular layer is then identified based on Bayesian classification of segmented skin epidermis pixels. Finally, the melanoma DoI is computed using a multi-resolution approach with Hausdorff distance measurement. Experimental results show that the proposed technique provides a superior performance in measuring the melanoma DoI than two closely related techniques.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2V4, Canada.
authors.forename: Hongming
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Department of Oncology, Cross Cancer Institute, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 1Z2, Canada.
authors.forename: Richard
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Berendt
authors.affiliation: Department of Oncology, Cross Cancer Institute, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 1Z2, Canada.
authors.forename: Naresh
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Jha
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2V4, Canada. Electronic address: mmandal@ualberta.ca.
authors.forename: Mrinal
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mandal
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D058965:MART-1 Antigen / Q000378:metabolism; D008545:Melanoma / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging* / Q000473:pathology*; D060787:Neoplasm Grading / Q000379:methods*; D009361:Neoplasm Invasiveness / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000473:pathology; D012867:Skin / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000473:pathology*; D012878:Skin Neoplasms / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging* / Q000473:pathology*; D000096142:Cutaneous Malignant Melanoma
chemical_list: D058965:MART-1 Antigen; C548667:MLANA protein, human
keywords: Bayesian theorem; Epidermis segmentation; Melanoma detection; Thresholding; Tumor invasion