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In this paper we discuss the published relevant mycology dermatological reports which appeared in 1997 and 1998. The aims of this review is to give an actual view on antifungal therapy with a critical discussion on the efficacy of antifungals.
Imiquimod: Warts and Beyond Imiquimod (Aldara, 3M Pharmaceuticals, St Paul, Minn), a novel immunomodulatory imidazoquinolin heterocyclic amine, has shown potent antiviral and antitumor action both experimentally and in recent clinical trials. In clinical practice, the drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for topical application as a treatment of anogenital condylomata acuminata, and can be easily applied to affected areas by the patient at home, with 5% imiquimod cream left on overnight (6-10 hours) and then washed off, used 3 days a week for 16 weeks or until all visible warts have disappeared. Imiquimod shows no intrinsic antiviral or antineoplastic effect, but it is thought to owe its activity to in vivo induction of interferon alfa (IFN-a) subtypes 1, 2, 5, 6, and 8, and tumor necrosis factora(TNF-a).Multiplecell types including human peripheral blood mononuclearcellsandneonatal foreskin keratinocytes have been shown to produce these cytokines in the presence of imiquimod. In a recent clinical trial, 50%ofpatients applying5%imiquimod cream(n = 109;3times/wkfor16weeks) compared with 21% of patients applying 1% imiquimod cream (n = 102) and 11% of patients in a placebo vehicle group (n = 100) achieved eradication of all treated baseline warts. These results, which were obtained in a randomized, double-blinded,placebo-controlledfashion,compare favorablywithmore laborintensive and potentially painful standard rapid therapies such as excision, cryosurgery,electrosurgicalablation,and laser vaporization. In the above study, application of 5% imiquimod cream was not associated with systemic adverse symptoms, but did cause local inflammatory reactions including erythema (67%) that was characterized as severe at some point in 6 patients (5.7%). Recurrence in areas treated with 5% imiquimod cream occurred in 6 (13%) of 45 patients compared with no recurrences (0/ 18) in patients using 1% cream and a 10% recurrence rate in the placebo group (1/10). These rates compare favorably with alternative therapies such as cryotherapy, laser vaporization, and podophyllin, although comparison trials would be useful. This is especially true for podophyllin, a commonly used topical wart therapy that is less expensive than imiquimod and can be similarly applied at home by the patient. A randomized controlled trial comparing respective clearance rates, recurrence rates, and adverse effect profiles for these 2 competing topical therapies would be clinically useful. Evidence suggests that imiquimod may work by inducing a cell-mediated immune response to clear wart-inducing human papillomavirus with reduction in human papillomavirus viral load during treatment correlating with increased local production of IFN-a, IFN-b, and IFN-g and TNF-a. Similar clearance results have been obtained with intralesional injection of IFN-a, which cannot be topically absorbed, is costly ($350/10-million U vial of IFN-a 2b), and requires multiple visits for painful injections, with the added risk of systemic adverse effects. Topically applied imiquimod cream also effectively treated the poxvirusinducedmolluscumcontagiosuminarecent,prospective,controlledclinicaltrial, and thus is a reasonable topical therapy alternative for refractory and extensive molluscumlesionsnotresponsivetocryotherapy or tape-stripping (a mechanical techniqueforsheeringoffsolitarylesions). Otherclinicalapplicationsforimiquimod may be around the corner. For instance, oral imiquimodhasshownantitumoreffects on several murine tumor cell lines, withantitumoreffectssignificantlydiminishedbyconcurrentadministrationofantiserumtomurineIFN-a.Thesedatamay yield future clinical applications, with clinical trials currently under way to evaluate the effect of topical imiquimod oncutaneousmalignancies suchasbasal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma,andhumanpapillomavirus–induced dysplastic lesions.
BACKGROUND: Vitamin C (also known as L-ascorbic acid) plays a critical role in reactive oxygen species (ROS) reduction and cell regeneration by protecting cell from oxidative stress. Although vitamin C is widely used in cosmetic and therapeutic markets, there is considerable evidence that vitamin C easily undergoes oxidation by air, pH, temperature, and UV light upon storage. This deficiency of vitamin C decreases its potency as an antioxidant and reduces the shelf-life of products containing vitamin C as its ingredient. To overcome the deficiency of vitamin C, we have developed Aptamin C, an innovative DNA aptamer maximizing the antioxidant efficacy of vitamin C by binding to the reduced form of vitamin C and delaying its oxidation. METHODS: Binding of Aptamin C with vitamin C was determined using ITC analysis. ITC experiment was performed 0.2 mmol/L vitamin C that was injected 25 times in 2 µL aliquots into the 1.8 mL sample cell containing the Aptamin C at a concentration of 0.02 mmol/L. The data were fitted to a one-site binding isotherm using with origin program for ITC v.5.0. RESULTS: To investigate the effect of Aptamin C and vitamin C complex in human skins, both in vitro and clinical tests were performed. We observed that the complex of Aptamin C and vitamin C was significantly effective in wrinkle improvement, whitening effect, and hydration increase. In the clinical test, subjects treated with the complex showed dramatic improvement in skin irritation and itching. No adverse reaction was presented by Aptamin C complex in the test. CONCLUSION: Taken together, these results showed that Aptamin C, an innovative novel compound, should potentially be served as a key cosmeceutical ingredient for a range of skin conditions.
Context Dendrobium officinale Kimura et Migo (Orchidaceae) is a naturally occurring precious traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) originally used in treating yin-deficiency diseases. The main active substances of Dendrobium officinale are polysaccharides (DOP). Recent findings highlighted the potential of DOP as a promising natural material for medical use with a diversity of pharmaceutical effects.Objective In this review, we provide a systematic discussion of the current development and potential pharmacological effects of Dendrobium officinale polysaccharides in dermatology.Methods English and Chinese literature from 1987 to 2019 indexed in databases including PubMed, PubMed Central, Web of Science, ISI, Scopus and CNKI (Chinese) was used. Dendrobium officinale, Dendrobium officinale polysaccharides, phytochemistry, chemical constituents, biological activities, and pharmacological activities were used as the key words.Results Dendrobium officinale polysaccharides have been found to possess hair growth promoting, skin moisturising and antioxidant effects, which are highly valued by doctors and cosmetic engineers. We highlighted advances in moisturising and antioxidant properties from in vivo and in vitro studies. Dendrobium officinale polysaccharides exhibited strong antioxidant effects by decreasing free radicals, enhancing antioxidant system, inhibiting nuclear factor-kappa B and down-regulating inflammatory response.Conclusions Our review is a foundation to inspire further research to facilitate the application of Dendrobium officinale polysaccharides in dermatology and promote active research of the use of TCM in dermatology.
This paper reports on advances in optical coherence tomography (OCT) for application in dermatology. Full-field OCT is a particular approach of OCT based on white-light interference microscopy. FF-OCT produces en face tomographic images by arithmetic combination of interferometric images acquired with an area camera and by illuminating the whole field of view with low-coherence light. The major interest of FF-OCT lies in its high imaging spatial resolution ($\sim$ 1.0 $μ$m) in both lateral and axial directions, using a simple and robust experimental arrangement. Line-field OCT (LF-OCT) is a recent evolution of FF-OCT with line illumination and line detection using a broadband spatially coherent light source and a line-scan camera in an interference microscope. LF-OCT and FF-OCT are similar in terms of spatial resolution. LF-OCT has a significant advantage over FF-OCT in terms of imaging penetration depth due to the confocal gate achieved by line illumination and detection. B-scan imaging using FF-OCT requires the acquisition of a stack of en face images, which usually prevents in vivo applications. B-scan imaging using LF-OCT can be considerably faster due to the possibility of usi
Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms using deep learning have advanced the classification of skin disease images; however these algorithms have been mostly applied "in silico" and not validated clinically. Most dermatology AI algorithms perform binary classification tasks (e.g. malignancy versus benign lesions), but this task is not representative of dermatologists' diagnostic range. The American Academy of Dermatology Task Force on Augmented Intelligence published a position statement emphasizing the importance of clinical validation to create human-computer synergy, termed augmented intelligence (AuI). Liu et al's recent paper, "A deep learning system for differential diagnosis of skin diseases" represents a significant advancement of AI in dermatology, bringing it closer to clinical impact. However, significant issues must be addressed before this algorithm can be integrated into clinical workflow. These issues include accurate and equitable model development, defining and assessing appropriate clinical outcomes, and real-world integration.
Teledermatology has become a widely accepted communication method in daily clinical practice, enabling remote care while showing strong agreement with in-person visits. Poor image quality remains an unsolved problem in teledermatology and is a major concern to practitioners, as bad-quality images reduce the usefulness of the remote consultation process. However, research on Image Quality Assessment (IQA) in dermatology is sparse, and does not leverage the latest advances in non-dermatology IQA, such as using larger image databases with ratings from large groups of human observers. In this work, we propose cross-domain training of IQA models, combining dermatology and non-dermatology IQA datasets. For this purpose, we created a novel dermatology IQA database, Legit.Health-DIQA-Artificial, using dermatology images from several sources and having them annotated by a group of human observers. We demonstrate that cross-domain training yields optimal performance across domains and overcomes one of the biggest limitations in dermatology IQA, which is the small scale of data, and leads to models trained on a larger pool of image distortions, resulting in a better management of image qualit
Racial bias in medicine, such as in dermatology, presents significant ethical and clinical challenges. This is likely to happen because there is a significant underrepresentation of darker skin tones in training datasets for machine learning models. While efforts to address bias in dermatology have focused on improving dataset diversity and mitigating disparities in discriminative models, the impact of racial bias on generative models remains underexplored. Generative models, such as Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), are increasingly used in healthcare applications, yet their fairness across diverse skin tones is currently not well understood. In this study, we evaluate the fairness of generative models in clinical dermatology with respect to racial bias. For this purpose, we first train a VAE with a perceptual loss to generate and reconstruct high-quality skin images across different skin tones. We utilize the Fitzpatrick17k dataset to examine how racial bias influences the representation and performance of these models. Our findings indicate that VAE performance is, as expected, influenced by representation, i.e. increased skin tone representation comes with increased performance
Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly important in medical applications; however, their evaluation in dermatology remains limited by datasets that focus primarily on image-level classification tasks such as lesion recognition. While valuable for recognition, such datasets cannot assess the full visual understanding, language grounding, and clinical reasoning capabilities of multimodal models. Visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks are required to evaluate how models interpret dermatological images, reason over fine-grained morphology, and generate clinically meaningful descriptions. We introduce DermaBench, a clinician-annotated dermatology VQA benchmark built on the Diverse Dermatology Images (DDI) dataset. DermaBench comprises 656 clinical images from 570 unique patients spanning Fitzpatrick skin types I-VI. Using a hierarchical annotation schema with 22 main questions (single-choice, multi-choice, and open-ended), expert dermatologists annotated each image for diagnosis, anatomic site, lesion morphology, distribution, surface features, color, and image quality, together with open-ended narrative descriptions and summaries, yielding approximately 14.474 VQA-style ann
Medical vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise as clinical assistants across various medical fields. However, specialized dermatology VLM capable of delivering professional and detailed diagnostic analysis remains underdeveloped, primarily due to less specialized text descriptions in current dermatology multimodal datasets. To address this issue, we propose MM-Skin, the first large-scale multimodal dermatology dataset that encompasses 3 imaging modalities, including clinical, dermoscopic, and pathological and nearly 10k high-quality image-text pairs collected from professional textbooks. In addition, we generate over 27k diverse, instruction-following vision question answering (VQA) samples (9 times the size of current largest dermatology VQA dataset). Leveraging public datasets and MM-Skin, we developed SkinVL, a dermatology-specific VLM designed for precise and nuanced skin disease interpretation. Comprehensive benchmark evaluations of SkinVL on VQA, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and zero-shot classification tasks across 8 datasets, reveal its exceptional performance for skin diseases in comparison to both general and medical VLM models. The introduction of MM-Skin and S
SkinGPT-4, a large vision-language model, leverages annotated skin disease images to augment clinical workflows in underserved communities. However, its training dataset predominantly represents lighter skin tones, limiting diagnostic accuracy for darker tones. Here, we evaluated performance biases in SkinGPT-4 across skin tones on common skin diseases, including eczema, allergic-contact dermatitis, and psoriasis using the open-sourced SCIN dataset. We leveraged the SkinGPT-4 backbone to develop finetuned models for custom skin disease classification tasks and explored bias mitigation strategies. Clinical evaluation by board-certified dermatologists on six relevant skin diseases from 300 SCIN cases assessed images for diagnostic accuracy, informativity, physician utility, and patient utility. Model fairness metrics, including demographic parity and equalized odds, were calculated across skin tones. SkinGPT-4 achieved an average demographic parity of 0.10 across Fitzpatrick types, with notable differences of 0.10-0.15 between lightest and darkest tones across evaluation metrics. Model hallucinations in artifacts and anatomy occurred at a rate of 17.8. Our customized models achieved
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show promise for medical applications, yet progress in dermatology lags due to limited training data, narrow task coverage, and lack of clinically-grounded supervision that mirrors expert diagnostic workflows. We present a comprehensive framework to address these gaps. First, we introduce DermoInstruct, a large-scale morphology-anchored instruction corpus comprising 211,243 images and 772,675 trajectories across five task formats, capturing the complete diagnostic pipeline from morphological observation and clinical reasoning to final diagnosis. Second, we establish DermoBench, a rigorous benchmark evaluating 11 tasks across four clinical axes: Morphology, Diagnosis, Reasoning, and Fairness, including a challenging subset of 3,600 expert-verified open-ended instances and human performance baselines. Third, we develop DermoGPT, a dermatology reasoning MLLM trained via supervised fine-tuning followed by our Morphologically-Anchored Visual-Inference-Consistent (MAVIC) reinforcement learning objective, which enforces consistency between visual observations and diagnostic conclusions. At inference, we deploy Confidence-Consistency Test-time adapt
Deep Learning approaches in dermatological image classification have shown promising results, yet the field faces significant methodological challenges that impede proper evaluation. This paper presents a dual contribution: first, a systematic analysis of current methodological practices in skin disease classification research, revealing substantial inconsistencies in data preparation, augmentation strategies, and performance reporting; second, a comprehensive training and evaluation framework demonstrated through experiments with the DINOv2-Large vision transformer across three benchmark datasets (HAM10000, DermNet, ISIC Atlas). The analysis identifies concerning patterns, including pre-split data augmentation and validation-based reporting, potentially leading to overestimated metrics, while highlighting the lack of unified methodology standards. The experimental results demonstrate DINOv2's performance in skin disease classification, achieving macro-averaged F1-scores of 0.85 (HAM10000), 0.71 (DermNet), and 0.84 (ISIC Atlas). Attention map analysis reveals critical patterns in the model's decision-making, showing sophisticated feature recognition in typical presentations but sig
A major barrier to developing vision large language models (LLMs) in dermatology is the lack of large image--text pairs dataset. We introduce DermaSynth, a dataset comprising of 92,020 synthetic image--text pairs curated from 45,205 images (13,568 clinical and 35,561 dermatoscopic) for dermatology-related clinical tasks. Leveraging state-of-the-art LLMs, using Gemini 2.0, we used clinically related prompts and self-instruct method to generate diverse and rich synthetic texts. Metadata of the datasets were incorporated into the input prompts by targeting to reduce potential hallucinations. The resulting dataset builds upon open access dermatological image repositories (DERM12345, BCN20000, PAD-UFES-20, SCIN, and HIBA) that have permissive CC-BY-4.0 licenses. We also fine-tuned a preliminary Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct model, DermatoLlama 1.0, on 5,000 samples. We anticipate this dataset to support and accelerate AI research in dermatology. Data and code underlying this work are accessible at https://github.com/abdurrahimyilmaz/DermaSynth.
The emergence of vision-language models has transformed medical AI, enabling unprecedented advances in diagnostic capability and clinical applications. However, progress in dermatology has lagged behind other medical domains due to the lack of standard image-text pairs. Existing dermatological datasets are limited in both scale and depth, offering only single-label annotations across a narrow range of diseases instead of rich textual descriptions, and lacking the crucial clinical context needed for real-world applications. To address these limitations, we present Derm1M, the first large-scale vision-language dataset for dermatology, comprising 1,029,761 image-text pairs. Built from diverse educational resources and structured around a standard ontology collaboratively developed by experts, Derm1M provides comprehensive coverage for over 390 skin conditions across four hierarchical levels and 130 clinical concepts with rich contextual information such as medical history, symptoms, and skin tone. To demonstrate Derm1M potential in advancing both AI research and clinical application, we pretrained a series of CLIP-like models, collectively called DermLIP, on this dataset. The DermLIP
Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to learn new classes over time without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. The emergence of foundation models (FM) pretrained on large datasets presents new opportunities for CIL by offering rich, transferable representations. However, their potential for enabling incremental learning in dermatology remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we systematically evaluate frozen FMs pretrained on large-scale skin lesion datasets for CIL in dermatological disease classification. We propose a simple yet effective approach where the backbone remains frozen, and a lightweight MLP is trained incrementally for each task. This setup achieves state-of-the-art performance without forgetting, outperforming regularization, replay, and architecture based methods. To further explore the capabilities of frozen FMs, we examine zero training scenarios using nearest mean classifiers with prototypes derived from their embeddings. Through extensive ablation studies, we demonstrate that this prototype based variant can also achieve competitive results. Our findings highlight the strength of frozen FMs for continual learning in dermatology and support their broad
Skin and subcutaneous diseases rank high among the leading contributors to the global burden of nonfatal diseases, impacting a considerable portion of the population. Nonetheless, the field of dermatology diagnosis faces three significant hurdles. Firstly, there is a shortage of dermatologists accessible to diagnose patients, particularly in rural regions. Secondly, accurately interpreting skin disease images poses a considerable challenge. Lastly, generating patient-friendly diagnostic reports is usually a time-consuming and labor-intensive task for dermatologists. To tackle these challenges, we present SkinGPT-4, which is the world's first interactive dermatology diagnostic system powered by an advanced visual large language model. SkinGPT-4 leverages a fine-tuned version of MiniGPT-4, trained on an extensive collection of skin disease images (comprising 52,929 publicly available and proprietary images) along with clinical concepts and doctors' notes. We designed a two-step training process to allow SkinGPT to express medical features in skin disease images with natural language and make accurate diagnoses of the types of skin diseases. With SkinGPT-4, users could upload their ow
Foundation models have transformed medical image analysis by providing robust feature representations that reduce the need for large-scale task-specific training. However, current benchmarks in dermatology often reduce the complex diagnostic taxonomy to flat, binary classification tasks, such as distinguishing melanoma from benign nevi. This oversimplification obscures a model's ability to perform fine-grained differential diagnoses, which is critical for clinical workflow integration. This study evaluates the utility of embeddings derived from ten foundation models, spanning general computer vision, general medical imaging, and dermatology-specific domains, for hierarchical skin lesion classification. Using the DERM12345 dataset, which comprises 40 lesion subclasses, we calculated frozen embeddings and trained lightweight adapter models using a five-fold cross-validation. We introduce a hierarchical evaluation framework that assesses performance across four levels of clinical granularity: 40 Subclasses, 15 Main Classes, 2 and 4 Superclasses, and Binary Malignancy. Our results reveal a "granularity gap" in model capabilities: MedImageInsights achieved the strongest overall performa
While artificial intelligence (AI) holds promise for supporting healthcare providers and improving the accuracy of medical diagnoses, a lack of transparency in the composition of datasets exposes AI models to the possibility of unintentional and avoidable mistakes. In particular, public and private image datasets of dermatological conditions rarely include information on skin color. As a start towards increasing transparency, AI researchers have appropriated the use of the Fitzpatrick skin type (FST) from a measure of patient photosensitivity to a measure for estimating skin tone in algorithmic audits of computer vision applications including facial recognition and dermatology diagnosis. In order to understand the variability of estimated FST annotations on images, we compare several FST annotation methods on a diverse set of 460 images of skin conditions from both textbooks and online dermatology atlases. We find the inter-rater reliability between three board-certified dermatologists is comparable to the inter-rater reliability between the board-certified dermatologists and two crowdsourcing methods. In contrast, we find that the Individual Typology Angle converted to FST (ITA-FS