Smartphone photos may be reliable in assessing psoriasis severity

Smartphone photos taken at home by patients with psoriasis can be reliably used to assess severity of disease, according to a poster presented at the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology virtual congress.

“Telemedicine tools are gradually gaining ground in dermatological practice and also have the potential to be incorporated into clinical trials to assess efficacy from remote,” Zarqa Ali, MD, PhD, of the department of dermatology and venereology and Wound Healing Centre, Copenhagen University Hospital Bispebjerg, and colleagues wrote.

Thirty-three patients with psoriasis vulgaris were recruited online using targeted Facebook advertisements, and psoriasis was assessed in person by two physicians using the Psoriasis Area and Severity Index and the Physician Global Assessment. Each patient later took photos of the same lesions from home using a smartphone application, and the photos were then evaluated by five blinded dermatologists for erythema, induration/thickness and scaling.

Using Pearson correlation, intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) and 95% confidence intervals were calculated between the in-person and remote assessments.

In-person PASI score correlated significantly with the remote scores, with an ICC of 0.784 (95% CI, 0.547-0.898) between the two.

A perfect agreement of PGA was observed in 53.1% of patients between remote and in-person assessment and 57.6% between first and second in-person assessment.

“This study showed good agreement between psoriasis severity assessed in person and from remote, suggesting that psoriasis severity can, with very low inter-rater variation, be reliably assessed using patient-obtained smartphone photos combined with patient-reported psoriasis extent,” the authors wrote.