Overview / Usage

One out of every twenty people does not have access to medical facilities. Skin diseases and afflictions affect more than 80% of the world’s population and are sometimes a sign of internal problems. Skin diseases are primarily diagnosed visually, and then by more invasive procedures (dermoscopic analysis, biopsy, and histopathological examination). A similar issue arises with plants, with more than 30% of crops in less affluent areas dying due to diseases. Due to this loss of crops, one in nine people are suffering from chronic undernourishment.

Automatically detecting and diagnosing these lesions has been challenging, owing to the variable properties of each disease image. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a new method of machine learning, one that is showing to be extremely promising at detecting images with real world variables. (lighting, focus, etc.)

In this project, I classified skin and plant ailments/diseases using a specially developed CNN, trained using only images of the conditions with only pixels and disease labels as inputs. I trained the CNN on a dataset of 200,000 clinical and horticultural images, consisting of 13 human diseases and 17 plant diseases. Outfitted on an IOS device, my application is capable of classifying skin and plant diseases will a level of competence comparable to dermatologists and plant pathologists. All the user must do is aim the camera of the smartphone towards the diseased area, and my application will provide a real-time diagnosis to the user by classifying the image using the CNN. The CNN achieves performance far above any other tested system, and its efficiency and ease of use will prove it to be a helpful tool for people around the world. There are currently 6,000,000,000 mobile subscriptions in place, so, therefore, my application could potentially provide low-cost universal access to vital diagnostics.