An Optimized Hardware System on Chip for Melanoma Detection

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer. Early detection of melanoma is vital, as it helps in decreasing the death rate as well as treatment costs. Dermatologists are using image-based diagnostic tools to assist them in decision-making and detecting melanoma at an early stage. We aim to develop a novel handheld medical scanning device dedicated to the early detection of melanoma at the primary healthcare with low cost and high performance. However, developing this particular device is very challenging due to the complicated computations required by the embedded diagnosis system. In this paper, we propose a hardware-friendly design for implementing an embedded system by exploiting the recent hardware advances in reconfigurable computing. The developed embedded system achieved optimized implementation results for the hardware resource utilization, power consumption, detection speed and processing time with high classification accuracy rate using real data for melanoma detection. Consequently, the proposed embedded diagnosis system meets the critical embedded systems constraints, which is capable of integration towards a cost- and energy-efficient medical device.