Abstract

The field of telehealth has developed rapidly in recent years. It provides medical support particularly to those who are living in remote areas and in emergency cases. Although developments in both technology and practice have been rapid, there are still many gaps in our knowledge with regard to the effective application of telehealth. This study investigated the classification of severity level in medical color images in telehealth, specifically the color red as one of the key symptoms when diagnosing different pathologies. The quality of medical images is safety critical when transmitting the symptoms of pathologies in telehealth, as distorted or degraded colors may result in errors.
The study focused on the use of digital images in teleconsultation, particularly on images showing cellulitis (skin bacterial infection) as case study, as this pathology involve the color red in its diagnosis.
Medical experts in dermatology were also involved to verify and select the relevant images used for this work, a series of 8 experiments were carried out using the real medical images, and the results showed a very poor level of consistency and accuracy.
The results showed that there is no difference between doctors and non-doctors in performing tasks related to color perception such as describing, grouping ranking and matching images that show different degrees of redness.
Further work will be reported about the human color perception using digital medical images of other pathologies (Conjunctivitis) in telehealth.