Clinical photography in dermatology using smartphones: An overview

Abstract

The smartphone is one of the biggest revolutions in the era of information technology. Its built in camera offers several advantages. Dermatologists, who handle a specialty that is inherently visual, are most benefited by this handy technology. Here in this article, we attempt to provide an overview of smartphone photography in clinical dermatology in order to help the dermatologist to get the best out of the available camera for clinical imaging and storage

Image-based teleconsultation using smartphones or tablets: qualitative assessment of medical experts

“…19 The large variations found within each image category and more so between the clinical photographs of the type not studied thus far (burns and dermatological) might enhance the importance of protocols for image capture in those specialties. 20 We believe that the results are robust as the design adopted included permutation of the devices, randomisation of the images and hidden device brands. The experiment was also conducted in realistic lightning conditions so as to represent an environment as similar as possible to what experts experience in real-life consultation.…”

Use of Smartphones for Early Detection of Melanoma: Systematic Review (Preprint)

“…On the one hand, this result may lead to further studies in the general population to assess the performance of the procedures in a primary care setting. On the other hand, this review emphasizes that the publication of data related to up-to-date technologies is a challenge in teledermatology [20,66]; it is notable that up to 70% of the photographs were of poor quality in a study performed in 2007 [51], whereas all photographs were interpretable in 2016 [50].…”

“…Today, it is surprising to note that no standards for taking photographs exist [66,68]. Our review identified a few characteristics related to the quality of the photographs: several views of the same lesion, close-up and distant, use of the autofocus and macro mode, a neutral background and good lighting.…”

“…While the abusive use of clinical photographs has become an increasing preoccupation of health fund organizations [75], only 30% of patients worry about the future of their photographs [76], and our review reported that only slightly more than half of the authors encrypted their data. While 60% of specialists continue to store photographs of their patients in their personal cell phones [74,[76][77][78][79], one perspective could be to develop recourse to encrypt the medical image libraries [66].…”

“…This review is original because of its specific focus on the following: 1) melanoma early detection (mortality issues are not comparable for other dermatological pathologies) [20,66,80,81]; 2) a primary care perspective (the sensibility and specificity of a test depend on the incidence of the disease); and 3) the use of a smartphone: a tool implemented worldwide at low cost (not comparable to other expensive videoconference procedures) without limiting the study selection to applications [20,80,81,82]; and because it was conducted according to the PRISMA guidelines [80][81][82]. However, this study had several weaknesses.…”