Geometric-Based Nail Segmentation for Clinical Measurements

A robust segmentation method that can be used to perform measurements on toenails is presented. The proposed method is used as the first step in a clinical trial to objectively quantify the incidence of a particular pathology. For such an assessment, it is necessary to distinguish a nail, which locally appears to be similar to the skin. Many algorithms have been used, each of which leverages different aspects of toenail appearance. We used the Hough transform to locate the tip of the toe and estimate the nail location and size. Subsequently, we classified the super-pixels of the image based on their geometric and photometric information. Thereafter, the watershed transform delineated the border of the nail. The method was validated using a 348-image medical dataset, achieving an accuracy of 0.993 and an F-measure of 0.925. The proposed method is considerably robust across samples, with respect to factors such as nail shape, skin pigmentation, illumination conditions, and appearance of large regions affected by a medical condition

An Encoder-Decoder CNN for Hair Removal in Dermoscopic Images

The process of removing occluding hair has a relevant role in the early and accurate diagnosis of skin cancer. It consists of detecting hairs and restore the texture below them, which is sporadically occluded. In this work, we present a model based on convolutional neural networks for hair removal in dermoscopic images. During the network's training, we use a combined loss function to improve the restoration ability of the proposed model. In order to train the CNN and to quantitatively validate their performance, we simulate the presence of skin hair in hairless images extracted from publicly known datasets such as the PH2, dermquest, dermis, EDRA2002, and the ISIC Data Archive. As far as we know, there is no other hair removal method based on deep learning. Thus, we compare our results with six state-of-the-art algorithms based on traditional computer vision techniques by means of similarity measures that compare the reference hairless image and the one with hair simulated. Finally, a statistical test is used to compare the methods. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our network.