Improved diagnosis by automated macro‐ and micro‐anatomical region mapping of skin photographs

Background The exact location of skin lesions is key in clinical dermatology. On one hand, it supports differential diagnosis (DD) since most skin conditions have specific predilection sites. On the other hand, location matters for dermatosurgical interventions. In practice, lesion evaluation is not well standardized and anatomical descriptions vary or lack altogether. Automated determination of anatomical location could benefit both situations. Objective Establish an automated method to determine anatomical regions in clinical patient pictures and evaluate the gain in DD performance of a deep learning model (DLM) when trained with lesion locations and images. Methods Retrospective study based on three datasets: macro‐anatomy for the main body regions with 6000 patient pictures partially labelled by a student, micro‐anatomy for the ear region with 182 pictures labelled by a student and DD with 3347 pictures of 16 diseases determined by dermatologists in clinical settings. For each dataset, a DLM was trained and evaluated on an independent test set. The primary outcome measures were the precision and sensitivity with 95% CI. For DD, we compared the performance of a DLM trained with lesion pictures only with a DLM trained with both pictures and locations. Results The average precision and sensitivity were 85% (CI 84–86), 84% (CI 83–85) for macro‐anatomy, 81% (CI 80–83), 80% (CI 77–83) for micro‐anatomy and 82% (CI 78–85), 81% (CI 77–84) for DD. We observed an improvement in DD performance of 6% (McNemar test P‐value 0.0009) for both average precision and sensitivity when training with both lesion pictures and locations. Conclusion Including location can be beneficial for DD DLM performance. The proposed method can generate body region maps from patient pictures and even reach surgery relevant anatomical precision, e.g. the ear region. Our method enables automated search of large clinical databases and make targeted anatomical image retrieval possible.