An Efficient Hybrid Optimization for Skin Cancer Detection Using PNN Classifier J. Jaculin Femil 1,* and T. Jaya 2 1 Ponjesly College of Engineering, Nagercoil, Tamilnadu, India 2 CSI Institute of Technology Thovalai, India *Corresponding Author: J. Jaculin Femil. Email: j.jacqueln19@gmail.com Received: 02 June 2022; Accepted: 12 July 2022 Abstract: The necessity of on-time cancer detection is extremely high in the recent days as it becomes a threat to human life. The skin cancer is considered as one of the dangerous diseases among other types of cancer since it causes severe health impacts on human beings and hence it is highly mandatory to detect the skin cancer in the early stage for providing adequate treatment. Therefore, an effective image processing approach is employed in this present study for the accurate detection of skin cancer. Initially, the dermoscopy images of skin lesions are retrieved and processed by eliminating the noises with the assistance of Gabor filter. Then, the pre-processed dermoscopy image is segmented into multiple regions by implementing cascaded Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm, which involves in improving the reliability of cancer detection. The A Gabor Response Co-occurrence Matrix (GRCM) is used to extract melanoma parameters in an effi- cient manner. A hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-Whale Optimization is then utilized for efficiently optimizing the extracted features. Finally, the fea- tures are significantly classified with the assistance of Probabilistic Neural Net- work (PNN) classifier for classifying the stages of skin lesion in an optimal manner. The whole work is stimulated in MATLAB and the attained outcomes have proved that the introduced approach delivers optimal results with maximal accuracy of 97.83%. Keywords: Gabor filter; GRCM; hybrid PSO-whale optimization algorithm; PNN classifier 1 Introduction World Health Organization has stated that the cancer is one of the major causes of death. Among different cancers, skin cancer is regarded as one of the common and hazardous types. There exist different skin disorders like Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC), Squamous Cell Carcinoma (SCC) and Malignant Melanoma (MM). The MM is the hazardous type of all as it affects other organs, which in turn leads to death [1]. Melanoma is a harmful tumor, which is produced by the cells containing melanocytes. Although melanoma is found anywhere in the body, it mostly grows on the back of the lower limbs. The American cancer society has assessed that around 7,230 individuals are recovered from melanoma but This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Computer Systems Science & Engineering DOI: 10.32604/csse.2023.032935 Article ech T Press Science