Automated severity scoring of atopic dermatitis patients by a deep neural network

Scoring atopic dermatitis (AD) severity with the Eczema Area and Severity Index (EASI) in an objective and reproducible manner is challenging. Automated measurement of erythema, papulation, excoriation, and lichenification severity using images has not yet been investigated. Our aim was to determine whether convolutional neural networks (CNNs) could assess erythema, papulation, excoriation, and lichenification severity at a level of competence comparable to dermatologists. We created a standard dataset of 8,000 clinical images showing AD. Each component of the EASI was scored from 0 to 3 by three dermatologists. We trained four CNNs (ResNet V1, ResNet V2, GoogLeNet, and VGG-Net) with the image dataset and determined which CNN was the most suitable for erythema, papulation, excoriation, and lichenification scoring. The brightness of the images in each dataset was adjusted to − 80% to + 80% of the original brightness (i.e., 9 levels by 20%) to investigate if the CNNs accurately measured scores if image brightness levels were changed. Compared to the dermatologists’ scoring, accuracy rates of the CNNs were 99.17% for erythema, 93.17% for papulation, 96.00% for excoriation, and 97.17% for lichenification. CNNs trained with brightness-adjusted images achieved a high accuracy without the need to standardize camera settings. These results suggested that CNNs perform at level of competence comparable to dermatologists for scoring erythema, papulation, excoriation, and lichenification severity.