Malignant melanoma detection by Bag-of-Features classification

In this paper, we apply a Bag-of-Features approach to malignant melanoma detection based on epiluminescence microscopy imaging. Each skin lesion is represented by a histogram of codewords or clusters identified from a training data set. Classification results using Naive Bayes classification and Support Vector Machines are reported. The best performance obtained is 82.21% on a dataset of 100 skin lesion images. Furthermore, since in melanoma screening false negative errors have a much higher impact and associated cost than false positive ones, we use the Neyman-Pearson score in our model selection scheme.