Intelligent System for Diagnosis of Erythema Migrans

Lyme borreliosis is the most common human tick-borne infectious disease of the Northern Hemisphere. One of the first signs of the disease is erythema migrans, a skin lesion that appears within days to weeks after an infected tick bite. In this article, a novel intelligent system for erythema migrans recognition is presented based on image and text information, applicable for individual and clinical web-based use. Novelties of our approach include a combination of visual and textual attributes, a new combination of visual attributes (geometrical, color, and Gabor-filter based), and a new algorithm for calculation of color-based attributes. Procedurally, the intelligent system for erythema migrans recognition integrated in a web-based application facilitates provisional diagnosis of erythema migrans in the general population and assists general medical practitioners in their decisions. Several classification methods-Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machine, Adaboost, and Random forest-were tested in order to achieve improved performance.