23-02-2017, 11:14 AM
Recently, there have been a growing number of studies applying imaging techniques to analyse melanocytic lesions for atypia and possible malignancy and for total body mapping. However, such lesions may be partially obscured by body hairs. None of these studies have fully addressed the problem of human hairs occluding imaging lesions. In our previous study we designed an automatic segmentation program to differentiate cutaneous lesions from normal healthy skin and learned that the program worked well with most images, with the exception of those with hairs, especially dark hairs, that cover Part of the injuries. These thick dark hairs confused the program, resulting in unsatisfactory segmentation results. In this article, we present a method to remove hairs from an image using a preprocessing program that we have called Dull Razor. This preprocessing step allows the segmentation program to achieve satisfactory results.