Throughout the last few years, science and technology have undergone massive advances. As a result, our lifestyles have changed dramatically.

AI, standing for Artificial Intelligence, is one of the buzzwords in tech that transforms every walk of our lives, including medicine. Although AI has been used in many sectors of medicine throughout the last few years, its usage in Dermatology is pretty new (yet extremely crucial and helpful).

This article discusses the overall role of AI in Dermatology, some AI applications used in the field, and what the future of Dermatology will look like with AI.

Table of contents:

• How are AI and dermatology connected?
• AI applications in dermatology
• The future of Ai in dermatology

How are AI and dermatology connected?

As it is known, dermatology is the field of medicine dealing with the structure, functioning, and disorders of the skin, hair, and nail. Usually, to be able to make decisions about skin type, skin cancer, nails, etc., dermatologists use tests or some kind of device, lasers, or dermatoscopy.

Dermatology is an excellent field for utilizing AI image recognition capabilities to aid diagnosis. Considering the visual nature of dermatology, much AI research is centered on image categorization to improve the diagnosis accuracy of diseases which is done using image annotation tools. Through computerized segmentation analysis of clinical, dermatoscopic, and histopathologic pictures, AI can lead to a more precise dermatologic diagnosis, which may help minimize patient morbidity and death.

More specifically, certain technologies and tools are included in AI that can help the doctor detect the disease. For example, face recognition technology can instantly search and analyze databases of faces, compare them to each other and understand if the patients have the same disease.

Image segmentation, another crucial part of AI, can help the dermatologist look better at the skin/hair/nail as it can separate the digital image into several parts and process accordingly.

A dermatologist might even be able to annotate images and then use them for training an AI and machine learning model that will make predictions. Moving forward, here are some diseases that can be predicted with the help of Artificial Intelligence:

Psoriasis

 

AI in Psoriasis can aid clinical evaluation, individualized therapy protocol selection, and disease prediction. Research has shown that using an AI model to forecast Psoriasis was one of the most intriguing and early uses of AI in dermatology. It used gene expression profiles derived from microarrays from two datasets: GSE14905 and GSE13355. The expertise of three feature selection algorithms was combined in this work, which indicated 21 characteristics belonging to 18 genes as possible markers. The final psoriasis classification model was created with the innovative Incremental Feature Selection approach, which only uses three aspects from two distinct genes, IGFL1 and C10orf99. Over three particular validation procedures, this model displayed exceptionally steady prediction accuracy (averaging 99.81%).

Atopic dermatitis

 

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic inflammatory condition characterized by extreme itching and hyper-reactivity of the skin to environmental stimuli that are harmless in non-atopic people.

The application of AI in atopic dermatitis can assist in the identification and individualized treatment of the ailment and in predicting treatment results. It may also be effective in standardizing and reducing the time required to inspect patients. Thanks to the data located in databases, dermatologists get a chance to identify a disease in several minutes.

Dermatology Specific EHR

 

The system automatically imports Audiogram reports and images into the patient record, saving time for doctor’s office staff members and patients. CureMD’s Dermatology EHR empowers you to make the most of your time by automatically adapting our software according to your individual patterns. Our AI dermatology is an incredible tool that can be used to help you achieve optimal efficiency.

Onychomycosis

 

Another research in the field of dermatology, specifically onychomycosis (ingrown nails), is characterized by the nail plate sinking beneath the periungual epidermis, resulting in severe inflammation, infection, and granulation. Research done in 2018 achieved diagnosis accuracy for onychomycosis using deep learning that was superior to that of most dermatologists who participated in this study based on a dataset of 49,567 pictures. They reached sensitivity and specificity ranges of 82.7%-96.7% and 69.3%-96.7%, respectively, on the validation datasets.

AI applications in dermatology

Here are some AI applications that dermatologists use these days:

DermAssist

 

It is not a secret that early identification can be one of the most essential components in the disease’s treatment and cure. The research suggests that AI-enabled computer vision systems can properly assess photos of lesions for melanoma diagnosis or other skin diseases. The technique can be used to classify diseases accurately and provide early diagnosis.

After three years of machine learning and product development, Google revealed plans to deploy Derm Assist in 2021.

According to reports, Derm Assist is an AI-powered platform that will allow consumers to self-assess hundreds of skin diseases by uploading images of their skin and completing related questions. Derm Assist then analyzes the data and presents the user with a list of probable matching circumstances, delivering personalized recommendations.

Aysa

 

Aysa, a symptom checker app powered by artificial intelligence, enables people to get more educated and make better decisions regarding their unique skin issues. Aysa is using the VisualDx platform, which integrates clinical search and professional medical knowledge with a collection of over 120,000 of the world’s most outstanding medical pictures.

If the person just takes a photo of their skin condition and answers the questions provided by the app, they will get a chance to get responses and recommendations from Aysa.

The future of AI in dermatology

 

Although in most cases, patients can benefit from the predictions of AI for dermatology, image data for many skin illnesses are still sparse, information exchange between sources is limited, and skin picture quality varies.

So, in that sense, this field has a long way to go and cannot still replace doctors. Nevertheless, we should remember that AI is a new field, and we can’t expect changes to happen soon.

To put everything in a nutshell, Artificial Intelligence is one of the exciting developments so far. It walks with us in every field of our lives and makes our lives easier. This article covered the role of Artificial Intelligence in dermatology, including how they are interconnected, some of the diseases that AI can detect, and the possible future for this machine-made intelligence.