Intelligent Healthcare Platform for Diagnosis of Scalp and Hair Disorders

Abstract

Various scalp and hair disorders distress numerous people. Severe scalp hair disorders have an adverse effect on appearance, self-confidence, and quality of life. Therefore, early and exact diagnosis of various scalp hair disorders is important for timely treatment. However, conventional manual examination method is time-consuming, objective, and labor-intensive. The presented study proposes an intelligent healthcare platform for identifying severity levels of six common scalp hair disorders such as dryness, oiliness, erythema, folliculitis, dandruff, and hair loss. To establish a suitable scalp image classification model, we tested three deep learning models (ResNet-152, EfficientNet-B6, and ViT-B/16). Among the three tested deep learning models, the ViT-B/16 model exhibited the best classification performance with an average accuracy of 78.31%. In addition, the attention rollout method was applied to explain the decision of the trained ViT-B/16 model and highlight approximate lesion areas with no additional annotation procedure. Finally, Scalp checker software was developed based on the trained ViT-B/16 model and the attention rollout method. Accordingly, this proposed platform facilitates objective monitoring states of the scalp and early diagnosis of hairy scalp problems.