Automatic detection of irregular borders in melanoma and other skin tumors.

An irregularity index previously developed is applied to detect irregular borders automatically in skin tumor images, particularly malignant melanoma. The irregularity index is used to classify various tumor borders as irregular or regular. This procedure processes tumor images with borders automatically determined by a radial search algorithm previously described. Potential use of this algorithm in an in vivo skin cancer detection system and errors expected in the use of the algorithm are discussed.