DermaDoc: The skin specialist app

Authors: Prakriti Bansal, Tanvi Dadu, Arshia Kaul

Abstract


The age of technology has brought about a revolutionary change in the field of medicine, from cloud based data and software to recommending treatment plans and medications using AI (Artificial Intelligence) faster than any medical professional could possibly ever. Same is the case with the field of dermatology. It can be a dire task to identify skin diseases at places where proper healthcare facilities are unavailable. At times, high consultation fees charged by dermatologists also acts as a barrier for the lower-class from getting the proper medical attention required.
The app intends to tackle this problem by creating a skin disease diagnosis application which will serve the general public for a range of skin diseases. The images will be fed by the user which will be used by the app to diagnose the skin disorder using computer vision. By developing a user intuitive application, we aim to provide the general population with a small, low-cost substitute for skin disorder detection.

Motivation


Our main motivation lies not only in the creation of the application for rural areas but in giving the community a product, which can be used by general public and maybe by medical professionals to verify their results or help them with their diagnosis. Several times, people tend to ignore minute symptoms due to the time constraints or unavailability of dermatologists(especially, in rural areas). These symptoms which act as indicators of skin disorders might eventually turn into a grave problem.

The Problem Identified


It’s a common practice among people to refer the internet or various easily accessible resources before they consult a doctor. This can often create a sense of panic and confusion if the sources are not reliable. In the case of skin diseases, where it might be very hard to describe the exact condition through verbal description, diagnosis through image recognition could be the future of skin disease detection. There already exist some applications which diagnose skin diseases through the textual description provided by the user. However, this very description can be questionable as the patient might accidentally distort the facts while providing the information. So, as tech enthusiasts, our teams believes that there’s a needs to devise a mechanism which will not be dependent only on the user’s textual description but rather, rely on factual information like images and videos.

Workflow: The DermaDoc App

Solution: The DermaDoc App


The app incorporates image recognition to provide an accurate diagnosis of the skin disorder without any biases. This app will allow the users to narrow down the disease depending upon the images of the affected area. According to the disease detected, the app will provide some suggestion to prevent the disease from spreading further along with the contact of the nearest dermatologist that the patient can visit.