Show 2. maj 2025
October 10, 2021
LEO Innovation Lab Imagine Team co-creation med patienter og dermatologer
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LEO Innovation Lab Imagine Team co-creation med patienter og dermatologer
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Artificial intelligence is changing the fabric of healthcare. From contributing to more accurate diagnoses to increasing access to healthcare, the potential for change is significant.
1 in 3 people will develop a skin disease over the course of their lives, but the infrastructure to help them doesn’t exist. The World Health Organisation estimates a massive global shortage of almost 13 million healthcare workers by 2035, meaning healthcare is increasingly becoming a luxury when it should be a right. Change is needed if patients are to receive the support, they need.
We already fall short within dermatology. In Denmark, for example, there’s only about 110 dermatologists to serve a nation of more than 5.7 million, and with 3,000 known skin diseases, the risk of misdiagnosis is high.
LEO Innovation Lab was established in 2015 by LEO Pharma to improve the lives of people living with chronic skin conditions worldwide. LEO Pharma is owned by the LEO Foundation, with no shareholders, and all profits are reinvested to help patients. We work as an independent unit, functioning with a high degree of autonomy to maintain a focus on patient needs.
Where our corporate mothership develops medical treatments, we look at the problems of everyday life and seek to meet the needs of patients with digital technology - and to drive products to market much faster through a minimal viable product approach and a stringent 100-day built phase. Within this iteration and validation process, we work in close partnership with doctors and with consistent feedback from patients through user testing.
In the 3.5 years since its inception, LEO Innovation Lab has pushed the frontier of possibilities in machine learning and imaging technology, AI-assisted diagnostic insights, and the digitalisation of clinical trials.
Our vision is to leverage artificial intelligence to improve the patient journey and augment doctors in their encounters with patients, thereby alleviating some of the strain on public healthcare. We’ve studied the patient journey closely to identify the most critical pain points standing in the patient’s way towards recovery. From discovering your first symptom to getting the right treatment, many inefficiencies manifest themselves along the way including misdiagnosis, long waiting times, inadequate treatments, poor follow-up, low adherence, and unaccounted lifestyle influence.
LEO Innovation Lab’s solution is to make healthcare more accessible. Technological advancements in machine learning and imaging have enabled digital healthcare to advance rapidly. Clinical support can now be carried out through the convenience of a smartphone. We want to augment doctors in their decisions with technology, and to help patients receive an accurate diagnosis and optimal treatment early on in their journey.
In 2017, we launched the free skin tracking app Imagine. It’s designed to help patients stay on top and in control of their skin condition.
By taking photos with their smartphone, users can track skin lesions as they change over time. This documentation aims to empower them to draw correlations with lifestyle triggers, assess the efficacy of treatments, and consequently to find the optimal treatment and lifestyle as fast as possible.
One of the challenges with skin conditions is that symptoms fluctuate, and the waiting time to see a dermatologist can be several weeks or months. Flare-ups don’t wait for a specialist. Patients also have a hard time recalling the state of their skin condition some weeks earlier.
Imagine gives patients a tool to bridge the gap between consultations with quality imaging for both the patients and doctors.
Leveraging the extensive imaging data built up from global usage of Imagine’s tracking app, we’re developing a platform that is capable of diagnosing skin conditions from a smartphone image. The technology is powered by artificial intelligence (AI), combining computer vision capabilities with deep learning. Thousands of smartphone images representing diverse skin types from across the world have contributed to the platform's development and bringing its accuracy to the same level as clinical experts.
This means we’re combining the ability to instantly diagnose skin conditions through the smartphone camera with tracking and progression monitoring to enable both patients and physicians to better understand the development of skin conditions. This technology has the potential to increase the accuracy of diagnosing skin diseases and monitoring treatment outcomes.
Imagine has more than 210,000 unique app installs and active users in 66 countries.
Based on the robust and dermatologist-validated database of skin images collated from the Imagine app, LEO Innovation Lab’s medical science and development team are building an AI-powered mobile application to diagnose skin conditions from smartphone images.
The system currently works most effectively for psoriasis, capable of diagnosing to an accuracy of 91%, which is on par with experienced dermatologists.
With dermatitis, we’ve reached an accuracy of 86%.
This technology can benefit both patients and doctors, as a study run by LEO Innovation Lab has revealed that general practitioners diagnose skin conditions with an accuracy of 50% on average.
We’re optimising our model to classify even more skin diseases, such as acne and rosacea, and we continue to include diverse skin tones to maintain an inclusive design and ensure our solution is applicable worldwide.
Ultimately, our goal is to provide expert-level dermatological disease management plans for everyone regardless of location and income. New advancements in AI, machine learning, and imaging have the potential to help us build this new future.
Danish Digital Award hylder de bedste digitale projekter
