An artificial intelligence approach for the recognition of early stages of eczema

Abstract

The rural population of India suffers from various medical ailments and due to the lack of medical facilities and practitioners, enough support is not available. Medical help might come late and the problem might have been aggravated. With the increasing awareness about artificial intelligence (AI), it is possible to solve these problems using technology. The research aims at detecting an early stage of the skin disease 'eczema', when the affected part of the human body is captured through a smart phone and approximate symptoms are provided by the medical practitioner. It uses artificial intelligence algorithms like convolutional neural networks and support vector machines algorithm for classifying the images, and back propagation algorithm for training a model based on the symptoms. Around 50 clinical photographs of eczema acquired from KEM Hospital, Mumbai to train the classifier and then different images of eczema were tested with an accuracy of greater than 85%.