ESTIMATION OF IMPROVEMENT IN ROSACEA USING IMAGE PROCESSING

This paper addresses a need by dermatologists of being able to assess quantitatively the change in severity of the skin disease rosacea. Traditionally, the efficacy of a treatment could only be assessed subjectively, such as by a dermatologist at weekly intervals giving a patient under treatment a score related to the degree of severity of the rosacea, with say a score of 5 meaning “severe” and a score of 1 “mild”. The method proposed in this paper is the first to offer an objective measure of the change in severity of rosacea; the basic idea is to use image processing techniques to find, assess and compare the sizes and degrees of redness of skin in photographs of a patient’s face taken over a period of time. Challenges include the need to take into account the different lighting conditions and orientations of the photographs.

[1]  S. Pizer,et al.  The Image Processing Handbook , 1994 .

[2]  Alvy Ray Smith,et al.  Color gamut transform pairs , 1978, SIGGRAPH.

[3]  A. Gupta,et al.  Topical metronidazole for rosacea. , 2002, Skin therapy letter.

[4]  Masahiro Yamaguchi,et al.  Extraction of acne lesion in acne patients from multispectral images , 2008, 2008 30th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

[5]  Vladimir Vezhnevets,et al.  A Survey on Pixel-Based Skin Color Detection Techniques , 2003 .