Band selection in spectral imaging for non-invasive melanoma diagnosis.

A method consisting of the combination of the Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling TEchnique (SMOTE) and the Sequential Forward Floating Selection (SFFS) technique is used to do band selection in a highly imbalanced, small size, two-class multispectral dataset of melanoma and non-melanoma lesions. The aim is to improve classification rate and help to identify those spectral bands that have a more important role in melanoma detection. All the processing steps were designed taking into account the low number of samples in the dataset, situation that is quite common in medical cases.