aevri / mel

Tools to help identify new and changing moles on the skin with the goal of early detection of melanoma skin cancer.

Mel

Work-in-progress tools to help identify new and changing moles on the skin with the goal of early detection of melanoma skin cancer.

The Mayo Clinic says:

The first melanoma signs and symptoms often are:

• A change in an existing mole
• The development of a new pigmented or unusual-looking growth on your skin

The UK National Health Service says:

The most common sign of melanoma is the appearance of a new mole or a change in an existing mole. This can happen anywhere on the body, but the back, legs, arms and face are most commonly affected.

To help you identify new and changing moles, the tools enable you to:

1. Maintain a catalog of your moles
2. Record a visual history of each mole

For the catalog to be useful, it must enable you to uniquely distinguish every mole from the other new and pre-existing moles. To this end you will be able to assign a name, identifying images and notes for each one.

For the visual history of each mole to be useful, it must enable you to identify significant differences in moles over time. The tools will help you to normalise the rotation and centering of your mole images so that they are easier to compare.

Things you can use now

"Mel Zero" - no executables, just documentation of how to create and maintain a mole catalog manually using a smartphone, a laptop, and a USB microscope.

"Mel One" - the code in this repository provides WIP rough tools for maintaining a mole catalog using two complimentary techniques. Moles are assigned UUIDs so they map across techniques:

• Roto-mapping: Detect new moles with the mel rotomap * commands. Using the idea of 'photographing a rotating cylinder and cycling through the photographs' as a cheap way of presenting an interactive 3D model, treat parts of the body as if they were a cylinder and create photosets of them. Provide support for manually and automatically marking moles in the images and mapping known ones to a UUID using some basic deep learning. Also provide support for manually comparing moles, but this better done with microscope images.

• Microscope imaging: Detect changes in moles with the mel micro * commands. These help you quickly capture and manually compare images of known moles with a USB microscope.

License

Distributed under the Apache License (version 2.0); see the LICENSE file at the top of the source tree for more information.