A Hybrid Neural Network - World Cup Optimization Algorithm for Melanoma Detection.

One of the most dangerous cancers in humans is Melanoma. However, early detection of melanoma can help us to cure it completely. This paper presents a new efficient method to detect malignancy in melanoma via images. At first, the extra scales are eliminated by using edge detection and smoothing. Afterwards, the proposed method can be utilized to segment the cancer images. Finally, the extra information is eliminated by morphological operations and used to focus on the area which melanoma boundary potentially exists. To do this, World Cup Optimization algorithm is utilized to optimize an MLP neural Networks (ANN). World Cup Optimization algorithm is a new meta-heuristic algorithm which is recently presented and has a good performance in some optimization problems. WCO is a derivative-free, Meta-Heuristic algorithm, mimicking the world's FIFA competitions. World cup Optimization algorithm is a global search algorithm while gradient-based back propagation method is local search. In this proposed algorithm, multi-layer perceptron network (MLP) employs the problem's constraints and WCO algorithm attempts to minimize the root mean square error. Experimental results show that the proposed method can develop the performance of the standard MLP algorithm significantly.