• Posted May 23, 2025

New AI Can Help Track Eczema

Eczema sufferers could soon find it easier to track their skin condition, via a newly developed AI that can assess severity using uploaded smartphone images.

The AI demonstrated high diagnostic accuracy in evaluating eczema shown in symptom photos uploaded by patients using their smartphone cameras, researchers reported May 19 in the journal Allergy.

“Many patients with eczema struggle to evaluate their disease severity on their own,” senior researcher Dr. Takeya Adachi, an assistant professor of dermatology at Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo, said in a news release.

“Our AI model allows for objective, real-time tracking using just a smartphone, empowering patients and potentially improving disease management,” he added.

Eczema, also known as atopic dermatitis, tends to flare repeatedly, requiring long-term monitoring and treatment adjustments, researchers said in background notes.

However, patient-reported symptoms like itchiness or sleep deprivation don’t always line up with how eczema rashes look to the naked eye, researchers said.

For the new AI, researchers gathered data from an eczema tracking app called Atopiyo that is popular in Japan. More than 28,000 users have shared more than 57,000 symptom photos and personal comments since 2018, researchers said.

The team built the AI to evaluate eczema severity based on where it’s located, the size of the rash, and how red, swollen or irritated by scratching the lesion has become.

The AI trained on a set of 880 images with self-reported itch scores, before researchers tested its effectiveness on another set of 220 test images.

In the test, the AI correctly detected 98% of body parts and 100% of eczema areas, and its analysis correlated well with severity scores from board-certified dermatologists and allergists, researchers said.

Researchers next plan to train the AI further by incorporating more skin types and age ranges, and including additional features from other clinical scoring systems for eczema.

“The AI model developed in this study has the potential to help patients with [eczema] objectively assess their skin condition, facilitating timely and appropriate treatment,” researchers concluded in their paper. “This study lays the groundwork for future advancements in AI-driven dermatological assessments, enhancing both patient care and clinical research.”

More information

The National Eczema Association has more on eczema.

SOURCES: Keio University, news release, May 20, 2025; Allergy, May 19, 2025