AN IMAGE BASED SYSTEM TO OBJECTIVEI,Y SCORE THE DEGREE OF REDNESS IN PSORIASIS LESIONS

Nowadays, many skin diseases exist, ranging from hannless such as benign tumors to
highly cancerous ones such as malignant melanoma. The visual resemblance of skin
lesions requires experienced dennatologists for diagnosis and treatment of skin
diseases. One of the most common types of the skin diseases is psoriasis which is
chronic inflammatory skin condition, characterized by localized, widespread welldemarcated
red plaques often topped by silvery scales. The basic characteristics of
psoriasis lesions namely redness, thickness, and scaliness provide a mean of assessing
the severity of psoriasis. Dennatologists are using Psoriasis Area and Severity Index
(P ASI) score, which takes into account signs such as redness, plaque thickness and
scaling in order to assess psoriasis disease severity. The objective of this project is to
generate the score of the redness and score of the area covered by psoriasis in order to
build automated imaging system capable of classifYing the severity of the disease.
This system would assist dennatologists to give the suitable treatment to the different
levels of psoriasis severity based on the PASI score. The psoriasis lesion images will
be analyzed to classifY the severity based on color, shape, size, and other features by
using the Digital Image Processing Tools in MATLAB7 soflware. The entire
infonnation obtained through the computer vision and image processing as well as
MATLAB7 soflware is applied towards the development of this project. The project
will be implemented in two stages .. The first stage (semester 1) involves literature
review, research, data gathering, learning and training of the soflware or program and
the second stage (semester 2) is analysis of core features, design, testing and analysis
of results.