Performance Measures for Imbalanced Data

Hi All !

My question is not directly regards to program but I know that in this community many valuable data miners exists and believe that I might reach the correct answer easily. I am doing decision tree classification and measuring both classification and binomial performance with using different paramater combinations. I need to select one of the good performed model to create decision tree for disease risk factors detection. I have read the article that says " Any performance metric that uses values from both columbs will be inherently sensitive to class skews". This meant to me that if I have imbalanced data I should not use those metrics. Could you please confirm my understanding?