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AI-Assisted Body-Region Recognition for Localized Scleroderma: A Foundational Step Towards Automated LoSCAT scoring

Authors: Yuanyuan Cao; Chongyue Zhao; Elena Derosasa; Claire Ding; Yiwen Zhang; Kathryn S. Torok; Wei Chen;

AI-Assisted Body-Region Recognition for Localized Scleroderma: A Foundational Step Towards Automated LoSCAT scoring

Abstract

Background: Localized scleroderma (LS) is a chronic inflammatory skin disease that can cause long-term functional and cosmetic morbidity, particularly in children. The Localized Scleroderma Cutaneous Assessment Tool (LoSCAT) is the standard for clinical evaluation but remains manual and time-intensive. Automating components of LoSCAT could improve scalability and consistency for clinical monitoring and research. <div> <br> </div> <div> Methods: We retrospectively curated de-identified clinical photographs from pediatric LS patients enrolled in the National Registry for Childhood Onset Scleroderma during 2010–2025. We developed a privacy-preserving R Shiny platform to support image labeling and quality control using LoSCAT-defined anatomic regions. Six trained raters labeled 5,965 images. For model development, we retained single-label images and merged left/right paired regions into 12 side-agnostic classes. A Vision Transformer (ViT) model was fine-tuned using a patient-level stratified group split (training: 1,790 images; test: 355 images) to prevent leakage and preserve class distribution. </div> <div> <br> </div> <div> Results: The ViT classifier achieved 0.778 accuracy and 0.776 macro-F1 on the held-out test set. Misclassifications occurred primarily between adjacent or visually similar regions (e.g., abdomen vs lower back; thigh vs leg), consistent with clinically plausible anatomic ambiguity rather than random errors. The trained classifier was subsequently applied to additional images to generate body-region labels at scale, enabling linkage to existing clinical LoSCAT scores for downstream analyses of lesion distribution and disease activity. </div> <div> <br> </div> <div> Conclusion: Automated body-region recognition in pediatric localized scleroderma photographs is feasible and clinically interpretable. This work provides a reproducible, privacy-preserving workflow that enables large-scale image organization and establishes a foundation for future region-specific lesion scoring and automated LoSCAT computation. </div>

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
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