A novel approach to multiclass psoriasis disease risk stratification: Machine learning paradigm

The stage and grade of psoriasis severity is clinically relevant and important for dermatologists as it aids them lead to a reliable and an accurate decision making process for better therapy. This paper proposes a novel psoriasis risk assessment system (pRAS) for stratification of psoriasis severity from colored psoriasis skin images having Asian Indian ethnicity. Machine learning paradigm is adapted for risk stratification of psoriasis disease grades utilizing offline training and online testing images. It uses two kinds of classifiers (support vector machines (SVM) and decision tree (DT)) during training and testing phases and two kinds of feature selection criteria (Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Fisher Discriminant Ratio (FDR)), thus, leading to an exhaustive comparison between these four systems. Our database consisted of 848 psoriasis images with five severity grades: healthy, mild, moderate, severe and very severe, consisting of 383, 47, 245, 145, and 28 images respectively.