Summary:
UCLA researchers in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department have developed SkinProfiler, an end-to-end skin profiling system that reconstructs and keeps track of 3D geometries of skin lesions and moles for long-term out-of-clinic skin health monitoring.
Background:
Skin cancers are among the most common types of cancer. In particular, malignant melanoma can be life-threatening if not detected early. If it can be detected early, the 5-year survival rate will increase from 10% to approximately 95%. Most moles, brown spots, and growths on the skin remain harmless but can develop into metastatic melanoma as a main complication. Therefore, it is essential and recommended to monitor moles and other skin lesions to look for changes in size, shape, or color. These existing examination methods only provide human-visible information and much depend on the examiners’ experience. There is an urgent and pressing need for an easily-accessible and user-friendly tool to improve the rate at which skin cancers are caught early.
Innovation:
UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have developed an accurate and easy-to-access mobile application SkinProfiler to keep track of skin lesion and mole developments in a precise and long-term manner. Users clamp an LED ring accessory onto smartphone cameras and take photos of the skin region of interest with the app, generating the 3D information for skin lesion and mole monitoring and diagnosis. The invention can help self-examine early signs of melanoma and enable long-
term out-of-clinic skin health monitoring. This mobile depth imaging tool is easily accessible, provide users with rich information, and functions outside clinics to facilitate accurate skin self-examinations. This novel tool will be available for real-world user applications and evaluations and could significantly improve patient outlook by improving early diagnostic capture of skin cancers.
Potential Applications:
• Skin health monitoring
• Mobile health sensing
• Smartphone-based skin imaging
• Photometric stereo imaging
• Cosmetic health
Advantages:
• Not labor-intensive
• Eliminates the need for lab preparation
• Accurate easy-to-access skin self-examination
• Low-cost mobile hardware assembly
• Providing information store service
Development-To-Date:
Invention has been conceived and fully described.
Related Papers:
Li, Z.; Viswanath, T.; Yan, Z.; Zhang, Y., SkinProfiler: low-cost 3D scanner for skin health monitoring with mobile devices. In Proceedings of the 2022 Workshop on Emerging Devices for Digital Biomarkers, Association for Computing Machinery: Portland, Oregon, 2022; pp 1–6.
Reference: UCLA Case No.2023-001-1
Lead Inventor: Yang Zhang