Digital Assessment of Facial Acne Vulgaris

Acne is chronic disorder of the pilosebaceous units with excess sebum production, follicular epidermal hyperproliferation, inflammation and Propionibacterium acnes (P acnes) activity. Dermatologists use manual methods such as direct visual assessment and ordinary flash photography to assess the acne. However, these manual methods are very time consuming and may result in intra-observer and inter-observer variations, even by experienced dermatologists. To address these issues, there have been a number of research conducted using computational imaging methods for aiding in the acne diagnosis but they fail while solving more complex classification problems, cannot be used for real-time analysis, are semi-automated methods and they lack flexibility