Morphological study of skin cancer lesions through a 3D scanner based on fringe projection and machine learning.

The effective and non-invasive diagnosis of skin cancer is a hot topic, since biopsy is a costly and time-consuming surgical procedure. As skin relief is an important biophysical feature that can be difficult to perceive with the naked eye and by touch, we developed a novel 3D imaging scanner based on fringe projection to obtain morphological parameters of skin lesions related to perimeter, area and volume with micrometric precision. We measured 608 samples and significant morphological differences were found between melanomas and nevi (<0.001). The capacity of the 3D scanner to distinguish these lesions was supported by a supervised machine learning algorithm resulting in 80.0% sensitivity and 76.7% specificity.