Diagnostic clinical decision support based on deep learning and knowledge-based systems for psoriasis: From diagnosis to treatment options

Psoriasis is an acute immuno-dermatological disease, affecting people of all ages, which significantly decreases quality of life. While the standard approach to identification and diagnosis of psoriasis is based on dermatologist decisions, various Deep Learning (DL) methods have been utilized to create Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems to detect and classify psoriasis cases. In response to the knowledge gap of an existing practical and functional DL-based solution to psoriasis diagnosis, this study proposed an ensemble Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model using Residual Network 50 Version 2 (ResNet50V2), ResNet101V2, and ResNet152V2 networks to create a CAD system for detecting and classifying psoriatic images. This ensemble model determines whether an input image is psoriatic using a binary classification procedure in the initial stage and classifies the psoriatic images into seven variants utilizing a multi-class classification. Furthermore, a treatment suggestion system was embedded within the diagnostic algorithm to suggest the best treatment options for psoriasis variants using a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method with the aim of reducing the disease symptoms in patients. A web-based Decision and Diagnostic Support System (D&DSS) is constructed to determine whether an input image is psoriatic, classify the psoriatic images into different variants, and accordingly recommend the best treatment options based on the observed disease symptoms in a patient. Nevertheless, the functionality and reliability of the proposed D&DSS are validated with high accuracy rates in both diagnostic and identification stages of the approach, which ratifies the practicality of this proposition.