SkinScan^©: A portable library for melanoma detection on handheld devices

Abstract

We have developed a portable library for automated detection of melanoma termed SkinScan© that can be used on smartphones and other handheld devices. Compared to desktop computers, embedded processors have limited processing speed, memory, and power, but they have the advantage of portability and low cost. In this study we explored the feasibility of running a sophisticated application for automated skin cancer detection on an Apple iPhone 4. Our results demonstrate that the proposed library with the advanced image processing and analysis algorithms has excellent performance on handheld and desktop computers. Therefore, deployment of smartphones as screening devices for skin cancer and other skin diseases can have a significant impact on health care delivery in underserved and remote areas.

Use of Smartphones for Early Detection of Melanoma: Systematic Review (Preprint)

“…Thirty-one studies were included in the review ( Figure 1): twenty studies had been published as original articles [32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50], six were conference papers [51][52][53][54][55][56] and five were research letters [57][58][59][60][61].…”

“…Fourteen studies had been conducted in Europe-Great Britain [33,40,43,60], Austria [34,51], Sweden [36,37], Ireland [61], Germany [45], Switzerland [48], Greece [56], The Netherlands [50] and France [39], nine in the USA [38,42,44,46,52,53,55,57,62], seven in Australia [32,35,41,47,49,58,59], and one in Singapore [54].…”

“…Twenty-one studies focused on patients with suspected melanoma lesions [32][33][34][35][36][37][39][40][41][42][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][58][59][60][61], while eight studies analysed images compiled in data banks [44,[52][53][54][55][56][57]61]. Among the twenty-one studies with patients, eleven included patients in primary care: either in the context of a screening campaign [39,46,48] or during targeted screening focusing on patients at an elevated risk of melanoma [32,35,58,59] or during opportunistic screening conducted in general practice [34,60].…”

“…Thirteen studies assessed applications that did not require the intervention of a dermatologist [44,45,47,50,[52][53][54][55][56][57][60][61][62]: three compared the conclusions of an application to the conclusions of a dermatologist who conducted a face-to-face examination [45,50,60], two compared the conclusions of an application to the conclusions of a teledermatologist [47,61], and eight analysed the images of an already classified data bank [44,[52][53][54][55][56][57]62]. Eight studies assessed store-and-forward teledermatology by comparing the conclusions of a teledermatologist to the conclusions of a dermatologist who conducted a face-to-face examination [33,34,36,37,39,46,48,51].…”

“…Thirtheen studies assessed the performance of the mobile applications, referring either to their capacity to classify the lesions at risk [44,47,50,[52][53][54]56,57,[60][61][62] or to their diagnostic capacity [45,55] (Table 1). The references used were the histology results in seven studies [44,45,50,52,[60][61][62], the dermatologist's conclusion after dermoscopy in two studies [47,53], and the dermatologist's conclusion after a sole clinical examination in one study [55].…”