Quantification of randomness (Entropy) as a clinical tool to assess the severity of skin disease.

In today's medical practice, the approach towards quantitative analysis of the skin is considered to be challenging and subjective. The current accepted measures and indexes do not exhibit a universal measurement, carry subjective opinions, and vary from one assessor to another. We propose a novel promising technique that provides a universal measure of various skin conditions which accesses the severity of skin disease in a quantitative manner. In this paper, we describe a clinical tool which provides a quantitative analysis of the skin using a mathematical algorithm of calculating Maximum entropy. The current work had been based on assessing skin lesions of psoriasis as a prototypic disease and adjacent healthy skin of patients in order to prove the concept of using computing entropy results to assess the skin condition. From the collected data of 11 pairs of the diseased and clinically healthy skin, the healthy skin displayed lower Entropy values with mean µâ€¯= 2.56 ±â€¯0.10 while skin affected by psoriasis displayed higher Entropy values with mean µâ€¯= 3.30 ±â€¯0.19.