Iterative fuzzy clustering for detecting regions of interest in skin lesions

Image analysis tools are spreading in dermatology since the introduction of dermoscopy (epiluminescence microscopy), in the effort of algorithmically reproducing clinical evaluations. Color-based region segmentation of skin lesions is one of the key steps for correctly collecting statistics that can help clinicians in their diagnosis. Nevertheless, an efficient and accurate region segmentation algorithm has not been proposed in the literature yet. This work proposes an iterative fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm based on PCA with the Karhunen-Loève transform of the color space. A topological tree is provided to store the mutual inclusions of the regions and then used to summarize the structural properties of the skin lesion. Preliminary experimental results are presented and discussed.