Multimodal texture analysis of OCT images as a diagnostic application for skin tumors

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an effective tool for determination of pathological topology that reflects structural and textural metamorphoses of tissue. In this paper, we propose a report about our examining of the validity of OCT in identifying changes using a skin cancer texture analysis compiled from Haralick texture features, fractal dimension, complex directional field features and Markov random field method from different tissues. The experimental data set contains 530 OCT images with normal skin and tumors as Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC), Malignant Melanoma (MM) and Nevus. Speckle reduction is an essential pre-processing part for OCT image analyze. In this work, we used an interval type-II fuzzy anisotropic diffusion algorithm for speckle noise reduction in OCT images (B- and/or C-scans). The Haralick texture features as contrast, correlation, energy, and homogeneity have been calculated in various directions. A box-counting method and other methodologies have been performed to evaluate fractal dimension of skin probes. The complex directional field calculated by the local gradient methodology provides important data for linear dividing of species. We also estimated autocorrelation function using Markov random fields. Additionally, the boosting has been used for the quality enhancing of the diagnosis method. And, finally, artificial neural network (ANN) has been utilized for comparing received rates. Our results demonstrate that these texture features may present helpful information to discriminate a tumor from healthy tissue. We obtained sensitivity about 92% and specificity about 95% for a task of discrimination between MM and healthy skin. Finally, a universal four classes classificatory has been built with average accuracy 75%.