In silico dermoscopy with detailed subsurface scattering

Abstract

We describe an approach to modeling dermoscopy, the imaging modality for the examination of skin lesions, using accurate subsurface scattering in human skin. We make use of an open-source, path-tracing program with advanced physics models as a rendering tool. Rendered scenes are based on biological details from human skin, such as layering, optical properties, and lesion variability, as well as on the properties of the image acquisition device. Preliminary results suggest that this can be an efficient and effective way to generate arbitrarily large datasets of fully featured images with known classification labels.