Automated quantification of the epidermal aging process using in-vivo confocal microscopy

Reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) is a powerful tool to visualize the skin layers at cellular resolution. The epidermal layer appears as a honeycomb pattern, whose regularity decreases with age. Our aim is to provide a method to automatically quantify the regularity of the honeycomb pattern. The proposed strategy relies on a cell-level supervised classification as regular or irregular using spatial information given by a prior segmentation. The aggregated scores defined by the classification results show significant correlation with chronological aging and photo-aging. Thus, our method enables practitioners to more objectively assess the quality of the epidermal layers on large cohort of subjects.