Revisiting Lesion Tracking in 3D Total Body Photography

Melanoma is the most deadly form of skin cancer. Tracking the evolution of nevi and detecting new lesions across the body is essential for the early detection of melanoma. Despite prior work on longitudinal tracking of skin lesions in 3D total body photography, there are still several challenges, including 1) low accuracy for finding correct lesion pairs across scans, 2) sensitivity to noisy lesion detection, and 3) lack of large-scale datasets with numerous annotated lesion pairs. We propose a framework that takes in a pair of 3D textured meshes, matches lesions in the context of total body photography, and identifies unmatchable lesions. We start by computing correspondence maps bringing the source and target meshes to a template mesh. Using these maps to define source/target signals over the template domain, we construct a flow field aligning the mapped signals. The initial correspondence maps are then refined by advecting forward/backward along the vector field. Finally, lesion assignment is performed using the refined correspondence maps. We propose the first large-scale dataset for skin lesion tracking with 25K lesion pairs across 198 subjects. The proposed method achieves a success rate of 89.9% (at 10 mm criterion) for all pairs of annotated lesions and a matching accuracy of 98.2% for subjects with more than 200 lesions.

A Novel Method to Improve Quality Surface Coverage in Multi-View Capture

The depth of field of a camera is a limiting factor for applications that require taking images at a short subject-to-camera distance or using a large focal length, such as total body photography, archaeology, and other close-range photogrammetry applications. Furthermore, in multi-view capture, where the target is larger than the camera's field of view, an efficient way to optimize surface coverage captured with quality remains a challenge. Given the 3D mesh of the target object and camera poses, we propose a novel method to derive a focus distance for each camera that optimizes the quality of the covered surface area. We first design an Expectation-Minimization (EM) algorithm to assign points on the mesh uniquely to cameras and then solve for a focus distance for each camera given the associated point set. We further improve the quality surface coverage by proposing a $k$-view algorithm that solves for the points assignment and focus distances by considering multiple views simultaneously. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method under various simulations for total body photography. The EM and $k$-view algorithms improve the relative cost of the baseline single-view methods by at least $24$% and $28$% respectively, corresponding to increasing the in-focus surface area by roughly $1550$ cm$^2$ and $1780$ cm$^2$. We believe the algorithms can be useful in a number of vision applications that require photogrammetric details but are limited by the depth of field.

Skin Lesion Correspondence Localization in Total Body Photography

Longitudinal tracking of skin lesions - finding correspondence, changes in morphology, and texture - is beneficial to the early detection of melanoma. However, it has not been well investigated in the context of full-body imaging. We propose a novel framework combining geometric and texture information to localize skin lesion correspondence from a source scan to a target scan in total body photography (TBP). Body landmarks or sparse correspondence are first created on the source and target 3D textured meshes. Every vertex on each of the meshes is then mapped to a feature vector characterizing the geodesic distances to the landmarks on that mesh. Then, for each lesion of interest (LOI) on the source, its corresponding location on the target is first coarsely estimated using the geometric information encoded in the feature vectors and then refined using the texture information. We evaluated the framework quantitatively on both a public and a private dataset, for which our success rates (at 10 mm criterion) are comparable to the only reported longitudinal study. As full-body 3D capture becomes more prevalent and has higher quality, we expect the proposed method to constitute a valuable step in the longitudinal tracking of skin lesions.