Area assessment of psoriasis lesions for PASI scoring

Psoriasis is a skin disorder which is caused by a genetic fault. Although there is no cure for psoriasis, there are many treatment modalities to help control the disease. To evaluate treatment efficacy, the current gold standard method, PASI (Psoriasis Area and Severity Index), is used to measure psoriasis severity by evaluating the area, erythema, scaliness and thickness of the plaques. However, the determination of PASI can be tedious and subjective. In this work, we develop a computer vision method that determines one of the PASI parameters, the lesion area. The method isolates healthy and healed skin areas from lesion areas by analysing the hue and chroma information in the CIE L*a*b* colour space. Centroids of healthy skin and psoriasis in the hue-chroma space are determined from selected sample. The Euclidean distance of all pixels from each centroid is calculated. Pixels are assigned to either healthy skin or psorasis lesion classes based on the minimum Euclidean distance. The study involves patients from different ethnic origins having three different skin tones. Results obtained show that the proposed method is able to determine lesion areas with accuracy higher than 90% for 28 out of 30 cases. © 2009 Informa UK Ltd.