International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) Melanoma Project

This international collaborative project, crosslinking the melanoma and imaging expertise of the international community of dermatologists, focuses on development of standards for skin imaging modalities. 

Aims: To support efforts to reduce melanoma-related deaths and unnecessary biopsies by improving the accuracy and efficiency of melanoma early detection.  This will be achieved by developing proposed digital imaging standards and creating a public archive of clinical and dermoscopic images of skin lesions.

Description: Digital images of skin lesions can be used to educate professionals and the public in melanoma recognition as well as directly aid in the diagnosis of melanoma through teledermatology, clinical decision support, and automated diagnosis. Currently, a lack of standards for dermatologic imaging undermines the quality and usefulness of skin lesion imaging. ISIC, in collaboration with industry including IBM and all vendors of dermoscopy devices, is developing proposed standards to address the technology, technique, and terminology used in skin imaging with special attention to the issues of privacy, metadata structure (DICOM for Dermatology) and interoperability (i.e., the ability to share images across technology and clinical platforms). In addition, ISIC is developing an open source public access archive of skin images to test and validate the proposed standards. The archive will also serve as a public resource of images for teaching and for the development and testing of automated diagnostic systems.

Status: This collaboration was initiated in May 2013 and is currently well underway with numerous meeting held usually in conjunction with International Dermatology Congresses (in 2015 San Francisco, Vienna, Vancouver and Copenhagen).