Authors:
            
                    Stefan Schnürle
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    ; 
                
                    Marc Pouly
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    ; 
                
                    Tim vor der Brück
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    ; 
                
                    Alexander Navarini
                    
                        
                                2
                            
                    
                     and
                
                    Thomas Koller
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    
                
        
        
            Affiliations:
            
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland
                
                    ; 
                
                    
                        
                                2
                            
                    
                    University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland
                
        
        
        
        
        
             Keyword(s):
            Machine Learning, Support Vector Machines, Classification, Eczema Detection and Quantification.
        
        
            
                Related
                    Ontology
                    Subjects/Areas/Topics:
                
                        Artificial Intelligence
                    ; 
                        Biomedical Engineering
                    ; 
                        Biomedical Signal Processing
                    ; 
                        Computational Intelligence
                    ; 
                        Data Manipulation
                    ; 
                        Evolutionary Computing
                    ; 
                        Health Engineering and Technology Applications
                    ; 
                        Human-Computer Interaction
                    ; 
                        Industrial Applications of AI
                    ; 
                        Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval
                    ; 
                        Knowledge-Based Systems
                    ; 
                        Machine Learning
                    ; 
                        Methodologies and Methods
                    ; 
                        Neurocomputing
                    ; 
                        Neurotechnology, Electronics and Informatics
                    ; 
                        Pattern Recognition
                    ; 
                        Physiological Computing Systems
                    ; 
                        Sensor Networks
                    ; 
                        Soft Computing
                    ; 
                        Symbolic Systems
                    
            
        
        
            
                Abstract: 
                Hand eczema is one of the most frequent skin diseases affecting up to 14% of the population. Early detection and continuous observation of eczemas allows for efficient treatment and can therefore relieve symptoms. However, purely manual skin control is tedious and often error prone. Thus, an automatic approach that can assist the dermatologist with his work is desirable. Together with our industry partner swiss4ward, we devised an image processing method for hand eczema segmentation based on support vector machines and conducted several experiments with different feature sets. Our implementation is planned to be integrated into a clinical information system for operational use at University Hospital Zurich. Instead of focusing on a high accuracy like most existing state-of-the-art approaches, we selected F1 score as our primary measure. This decision had several implications regarding the design of our segmentation method, since all popular implementations of support vector machines 
                aim for optimizing accuracy. Finally, we evaluated our system and achieved an F1 score of 58.6% for front sides of hands and 43.8% for back sides, which outperforms several state-of-the-art methods that were tested on our gold standard data set as well.
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