DERMA/Care: An Advanced image-Processing Mobile Application for Monitoring Skin Cancer

Abstract

This paper describes a mobile hardware/software system (DERMA/care) to help with screening of skin cancer (melanomas). Our system uses an inexpensive apparatus (microscope) and a smart phone (iPhone). These two components standalone are sufficient to capture highly detailed images for use by experts with medical background. However the novelty of our system lies in the fact that we further improved the efficiency of the system by implementing an advanced image-processing framework to detect suspicious areas and help with skin cancer prevention. Our main goal was to demonstrate how smart phones could turn into powerful and intelligent machines and help large populations without expertise in low-resource settings.