
doi: 10.2139/ssrn.6177101
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>
| 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). | 0 | |
| 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. | Average | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Average | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Average |
