The Classification of Six Common Skin Diseases Based on Xiangya-Derm: Development of a Chinese Database for Artificial Intelligence

Background Skin and subcutaneous disease is the fourth-leading cause of the nonfatal disease burden worldwide and constitutes one of the most common burdens in primary care. However, there is a severe lack of dermatologists, particularly in rural Chinese areas. Furthermore, although artificial intelligence (AI) tools can assist in diagnosing skin disorders from images, the database for the Chinese population is limited. Objective This study aims to establish a database for AI based on the Chinese population and presents an initial study on six common skin diseases. Methods Each image was captured with either a digital camera or a smartphone, verified by at least three experienced dermatologists and corresponding pathology information, and finally added to the Xiangya-Derm database. Based on this database, we conducted AI-assisted classification research on six common skin diseases and then proposed a network called Xy-SkinNet. Xy-SkinNet applies a two-step strategy to identify skin diseases. First, given an input image, we segmented the regions of the skin lesion. Second, we introduced an information fusion block to combine the output of all segmented regions. We compared the performance with 31 dermatologists of varied experiences. Results Xiangya-Derm, as a new database that consists of over 150,000 clinical images of 571 different skin diseases in the Chinese population, is the largest and most diverse dermatological data set of the Chinese population. The AI-based six-category classification achieved a top 3 accuracy of 84.77%, which exceeded the average accuracy of dermatologists (78.15%). Conclusions Xiangya-Derm, the largest database for the Chinese population, was created. The classification of six common skin conditions was conducted based on Xiangya-Derm to lay a foundation for product research.