A Method of Skin Disease Detection Using Image Processing and Machine Learning

Skin conditions are prevalent health issues globally. The dangers posed by these infections are unseen, leading to physical discomfort and mental anguish. In severe cases, skin diseases can even progress to skin cancer. Consequently, the identification of skin diseases from clinical images remains a significant challenge in medical image analysis. Furthermore, manual diagnosis by medical professionals is time-consuming and subjective. Therefore, there is a need for automated skin disease prediction to expedite treatment planning for both patients and dermatologists. These studies presents a digital hair removal method and de-blurs or denoise the images. To extract essential patterns from the skin imagesand statistical features techniques are utilized. Two efficient machine learning algorithms, namely Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifiers, are employed with the extracted features to accurately classify skin images as melanoma (MEL), melanocytic nevus (NV), basal cell carcinoma (BCC), actinic keratosis (AK), benign keratosis (BKL), dermatofibroma (DF), vascular lesion (VASC), and Squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). The models are validated using the ISIC 2019 challenge and HAM10000 datasets, with SVM demonstrating slightly superior performance compared to the other classifiers. Furthermore, a comparison with state-of-the-art methods is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.