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e-Derma – a Novel Wireless Dermatoscopy System

  • Mobile & Wireless Health
  • Published:
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Abstract

Cutaneous Melanoma (CM) is a malignant tumour, and is one of the most rapidly growing cancers. Discovering a melanoma in the early stages of the disease is extremely difficult and, as such, only an invasive disease stage can be identified easily with the naked eye. Dermatoscopy is a diagnostic method intended to maximise early detection of CM performed by the dermatoscopy system. To address the limitations of existing systems a novel, wireless digital dermatoscopy system is presented for providing high-resolution images. It integrates a wire-free camera operation and offers a safe transfer of captured images to the computer. The working process of available dermatoscopy systems was studied, which are the most commonly used in everyday dermatology practice. Some findings, like operability, image quality, scalability, user-friendliness, and safeness, were used for the development of an e-Derma dermatoscopy system. An assessment method was performed by a group of dermatoscopy trained dermatologists to evaluate the quality of the testing images. Finally, a laboratory evaluation of images in regard to different parameters like sharpness, colour representation and illumination was performed with the side-by-side comparison of images of available dermatoscopy systems. e-Derma is a novel dermatoscopy system, which eliminates some limitations of existing systems and provides high-quality images. A novel low-budget highly capable dermatoscopy system is presented. The integrated wireless image transfer technology eliminates the movement limitations of a therapist. The image resolution is not limited by the integrated camera; it is easily upgradable with a wide range of on market alternative or improved camera models.

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Acknowledgements

Authors thanks the medical personnel of the Department of Dermatology in the University Medical Centre Maribor for their significant help in the image assessment evaluation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Maribor, 2000, Maribor, Slovenia

    Bogdan Dugonik, D. Horvat, B. Žalik & D. Špelič

  2. Department of Dermatology, University Medical Centre Maribor, 2000, Maribor, Slovenia

    A. Dugonik

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  1. Bogdan Dugonik
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  2. A. Dugonik
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  3. D. Horvat
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Correspondence to Bogdan Dugonik.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Mobile & Wireless Health

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Dugonik, B., Dugonik, A., Horvat, D. et al. e-Derma – a Novel Wireless Dermatoscopy System. J Med Syst 41, 205 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-017-0849-6

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