An automatic feature extraction technique from the images of granular parakeratosis disease

Abstract

The largest and most vital part of the human body is skin and any change in the features of skin is termed as a skin lesion. The paper considers granular parakeratosis lesion that is an epidermal reaction occurring due to the disorder of keratinization, and mainly seen in intertriginous areas. The manual inspection of the lesion features is a bit cumbersome due to which an automated system is proposed in this paper. The main goal is to determine the size and depth of granular parakeratosis lesions using the proposed ensemble algorithm, partition clustering and region properties method. As a flow of the proposed model, segmentation is done using U-net with binary cross entropy, features are extracted using partition clustering and region properties method, and classification is done using SVM 10-fold model. The proposed feature extraction method estimates the depth and absolute size of K lesions in each image by predicting the absolute height and width of the lesion in terms of pixel square. After extracting the features, classification is done, thereby obtaining an accuracy of 95%, sensitivity and specificity of 100%. The proposed model provides better performance compared to state-of-the-art models. The main application of this automated system is in dermatology field where some skin lesions have same features which makes the experts to diagnose the disease incorrectly. If the proposed system is incorporated, diagnosis can be done in an effective manner considering all the relevant features.