Three scientists from Leibniz University Hannover (LUH) - Prof. Dr. Bernhard Roth, Lennart Jütte and Gaurav Sharma - are part of the new international project iToBoS, which aims to reduce the mortality rate of skin cancer by improving diagnostics from the earliest stage on.
Watch the report of Sat.1 here (in German):
The project partners are working on linking imaging technologies with all relevant individual patient information for the first time. The EU is funding the interdisciplinary project with twelve million euros over the next four years within the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.
The name explains the overall goal: the acronym iToBoS stands for "Intelligent Total Body Scanner for Early Detection of Melanoma". And this is precisely the kind of artificial intelligence-based skin cancer scanner the iToBoS team is striving to develop. The idea of analyzing the skin with optical technologies such as imaging, optical coherence tomography or laser analytics to detect skin lesions is widely investigated today. In practice, however, only visual diagnostics based on dermatoscopic devices placed directly on the suspicious skin areas are established so far. Moreover, these systems' contact mode of operation can falsify diagnoses and make it challenging to detect changes of skin lesions over time, particularly when patients have dozens of them on their bodies. The iToBoS researchers now aim to increase diagnostic precision with the help of non-contact imaging, which captures the entire skin surface simultaneously, in combination with individual patient data.
Linking imaging and patient data
The iToBoS full-body scanner will be equipped with optical imaging and artificial intelligence (AI) and incorporates information from all relevant sources, i.e. dermatoscopic images and patient records, into the diagnosis. For this purpose, the new system will also include specific characteristics such as age, gender, previous illnesses as well as the location and size of the skin malformation into account.
Read the full press release here.
