The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	Multi-spectral light interaction modeling and imaging of skin lesions
Author:	Patwardhan, Sachin Vidyanand
View Online:	njit-etd2004-030 (xi, 109 pages ~ 6.7 MB pdf)
Department:	Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Degree:	Doctor of Philosophy
Program:	Electrical Engineering
Document Type:	Dissertation
Advisory Committee:	Dhawan, Atam P. (Committee chair) Ansari, Nirwan (Committee member) Chang, Timothy Nam (Committee member) Federici, John Francis (Committee member) Reisman, Stanley S. (Committee member)
Date:	2004-01
Keywords:	Nevoscope Multi-spectral imaging Melanoma Monte Carlo simulation Wavelet transform analysis Fuzzy membership functions
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	Nevoscope as a diagnostic tool for melanoma was evaluated using a white light source with promising results. Information about the lesion depth and its structure will further improve the sensitivity and specificity of melanoma diagnosis. Wavelength-dependent variable penetration power of monochromatic light in the trans-illumination imaging using the Nevoscope can be used to obtain this information. Optimal selection of wavelengths for multi-spectral imaging requires light-tissue interaction modeling. For this, three-dimensional wavelength dependent voxel-based models of skin lesions with different depths are proposed. A Monte Carlo simulation algorithm (MCSVL) is developed in MATLAB and the tissue models are simulated using the Nevoscope optical geometry. 350-700nm optical wavelengths with an interval of 5nm are used in the study. A correlation analysis between the lesion depth and the diffuse reflectance is then used to obtain wavelengths that will produce diffuse reflectance suitable for imaging and give information related to the nevus depth and structure. Using the selected wavelengths, multi-spectral trans-illumination images of the skin lesions are collected and analyzed. An adaptive wavelet transform based tree-structure classification method (ADWAT) is proposed to classify epi-illuminance images of the skin lesions obtained using a white light source into melanoma and dysplastic nevus images classes. In this method, tree-structure models of melanoma and dysplastic nevus are developed and semantically compared with the tree-structure of the unknown image for classification. Development of the tree-structure is dependent on threshold selections obtained from a statistical analysis of the feature set. This makes the classification method adaptive. The true positive value obtained for this classifier is 90% with a false positive of 10%. The Extended ADWAT method and Fuzzy Membership Functions method using combined features from the epi-illuminance and multi-spectral images further improve the sensitivity and specificity of melanoma diagnosis. The combined feature set with the Extended-ADWAT method gives a true positive of 93.33% with a false positive of 8.88%. The Gaussian Membership Functions give a true positive of 100% with a false positive of 17.77% while the Bell Membership Functions give a true positive of 100% with a false positive of 4.44%.