The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to improve the quality of life and care for people living with complex, chronic skin conditions like psoriasis. This I-Corps project will allow customer discovery research for a novel mobile-based imaging system for the automatic objective assessment of psoriasis lesions and management of the treatment. The solution developed here provides a personalized chronic disease management which objectively assesses the disease progression and improves accessibility to clinical professionals as needed toward next-generation patient management systems. Psoriasis is an incurable skin disease affecting millions in the US who often suffer from severe physical pain, discomfort, social isolation, and psychological distress. This I-Corps project provides an objective evaluation of disease improvement that will enable physicians to keep track of treatment efficacy for various systemic and biologic treatments for each patient. It will potentially help the approval process for new treatments for dermatological diseases by simplifying the process of disease evaluation during clinical trials. It will provide patient empowerment for taking control and preventing disease progression and improve treatment adherence thus reducing economic burden for the patients and the health system.
This mobile-based imaging system includes a mobile app that utilizes a unique image processing and skin analysis algorithm that captures consistent calibrated images and specifies the severity level of the disease. The system determines Psoriasis Severity Index Score (PASI), a clinically accepted psoriasis scoring method, as a quantitative measure and based on clinical guidelines provides a descriptive measure (mild, moderate, or severe) to the user. It will work with different classifications of psoriasis disease, different skin types and under varying light conditions. It is developed based on extensive research in image processing techniques through extraction of features that efficiently capture the information about variations in color, texture and border irregularities of the diseased skin. Cloud based processing and storage of disease severity information over time enable automatic tracking of disease progression and associated prescription mapping provides the ability to assess the efficacy of the treatment. In addition, to improve the clinical diagnosis of psoriasis a multimode hyperspectral dermatoscope is used to accurately map the distribution of skin melanin and hemoglobin.
