Photographing Alopecia: How Many Pixels Are Needed for Clinical Evaluation?

Determining the minimum image resolution needed for clinical assessment is crucial for computational efficiency, image standardization, and storage needs alleviation. In this paper, we explore the image resolution requirements for the assessment of alopecia by analyzing how clinicians detect the presence of characteristics needed to quantify the disorder in the clinic. By setting the image resolution as a function of width of the patient’s head, we mimicked experiments conducted in the computer vision field to understand human perception in the context of scene recognition and object detection and asked 6 clinicians to identify the regions of interest on a set of retrospectively collected de-identified images at different resolutions. The experts were able to detect the presence of alopecia at very low resolutions, while significantly higher resolution was required to identify the presence of vellus-like hair. Furthermore, the accuracy with which alopecia was detected as a function of resolution followed the same trend as the one obtained when we classified normal versus abnormal hair density using a standard neural network architecture, hinting that the resolution needed by an expert human observer may also provide an upper bound for future image processing algorithms.