PSENet: Psoriasis severity evaluation network

Abstract

Psoriasis is a chronic skin disease which affects hundreds of millions of people around the world. This disease cannot be fully cured and requires lifelong caring. If the deterioration of Psoriasis is not detected and properly treated in time, it could cause serious complications or even lead to a life threat. Therefore, a quantitative measurement that can track the Psoriasis severity is necessary. Currently, PASI (Psoriasis Area and Severity Index) is the most frequently used measurement in clinical practices. However, PASI has the following disadvantages: (1) Time consuming: calculating PASI usually takes more than 30 minutes which poses a heavy burden on dermatologists; and (2) Inconsistency: due to the complexity of PASI calculation, different or even the same dermatologist could give different scores for the same case. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose PSENet which applies deep neural networks to estimate Psoriasis severity based on skin lesion images. Different from typical deep learning frameworks for image processing, PSENet has the following characteristics: (1) PSENet introduces a score refine module which is able to capture the visual features of skin at both coarse and fine-grained granularities; (2) PSENet uses siamese structure in training and accepts pairwise inputs, which reduces the dependency on large amount of training data; and (3) PSENet can not only estimate the severity, but also locate the skin lesion regions from the input image. To train and evaluate PSENet, we work with professional dermatologists from a top hospital and spend years in building a golden dataset. The experimental results show that PSENet can achieve the mean absolute error of 2.21 and the accuracy of 77.87% in pair comparison, outperforming baseline methods. Overall, PSENet not only relieves dermatologists from the dull PASI calculation but also enables patients to track Psoriasis severity in a much more convenient manner.