Classification of non-tumorous skin pigmentation disorders using voting based probabilistic linear discriminant analysis. (1st August 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Liang, Yunfeng; Sun, Lei; Ser, Wee; Lin, Feng; Thng, Steven Tien Guan; Chen, Qiping; Lin, Zhiping
• Is Part Of: Computers in biology and medicine. Volume 99(2018)
• Page Start: 123
• Page End: 132
• Publication Date: 2018-08-01
• Subjects: V-PLDA -- Non-tumorous -- Skin pigmentation disorders -- Image classification -- Large within-class variance; Medicine -- Data processing -- Periodicals; Biology -- Data processing -- Periodicals; 610.285
• DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2018.05.026
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0010-4825

Abstract

Abstract: Non-tumorous skin pigmentation disorders can have a huge negative emotional impact on patients. The correct diagnosis of these disorders is essential for proper treatments to be instituted. In this paper, we present a computerized method for classifying five non-tumorous skin pigmentation disorders (i.e., freckles, lentigines, Hori's nevus, melasma and nevus of Ota) based on probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA). To address the large within-class variance problem with pigmentation images, a voting based PLDA (V-PLDA) approach is proposed. The proposed V-PLDA method is tested on a dataset that contains 150 real-world images taken from patients. It is shown that the proposed V-PLDA method obtains significantly higher classification accuracy (4% or more with p< 0.001 in the analysis of variance (ANOVA) test) than the original PLDA method, as well as several state-of-the-art image classification methods. To the authors' best knowledge, this is the first study that focuses on the non-tumorous skin pigmentation image classification problem. Therefore, this paper could provide a benchmark for subsequent research on this topic. Additionally, the proposed V-PLDA method demonstrates promising performance in clinical applications related to skin pigmentation disorders.