2026 Projects

Dermatological diagnosis in patients with darker skin tones remains a persistent challenge, rooted in both clinical and systemic inequalities. Conditions such as melanoma, diabetic foot ulcers and lupus exemplify how the progress of critical lesions often goes unnoticed in darker skin. These diagnostic inequalities highlight the urgent need for objective and skin-tone-independent evaluation methods, raising questions of whether we should look beyond the visible spectrum in skin assessment. Spectral imaging does exactly that, but, despite its proven diagnostic potential, it remains largely inaccessible in low- and middle-income countries. Specifically in Brazil, a country with a diverse population that could benefit from a technology like this, acquiring and maintaining this equipment would be financially unfeasible to the Unified Health System (SUS) — the largest public health system in the world. To address this gap, focusing on future implementation on SUS, our project seeks to develop a universal multispectral imaging (MSI) platform for clinical dermatology, by integrating low-cost locally manufactured hardware with artificial intelligence-driven analytical software, and performing inclusive pre-clinical and clinical validation.

To implement this, we foresee nine milestones to be achieved in the next years:

• low-cost spectral imaging hardware;
• pre-clinical validation with skin phantoms;
• open-access local dataset;
• artificial intelligence algorithm for assisted skin assessment;
• comparison of our method with other commercial options;
• clinical validation; intellectual property;
• regulatory plans; implementation on SUS.

For Year 1, the first milestone (low-cost spectral imaging hardware) will be targeted, with activities divided in three phases: preparation, hardware development, and documentation and reports. With this is mind, we will need materials for both manufacturing, characterization, and calibration of the low-cost hardware, with a budget of $9869,67.

We hope that this project will promote health equity both in the near and distant future, bridging long-standing technological and social gaps in dermatological diagnosis. In the short term, this project will provide a practical response to racial bias in dermatology, with the development of low-cost multispectral imaging hardware and personalized software that objectively analyzes skin lesions across different skin tones. In a medium to long term, this work will also be a call for change in how medical technologies are conceived and developed, helping to set a path for inclusive biomedical innovation.

Furthermore, by releasing open-access datasets, in vitro skin phantoms, and software frameworks, we aim to encourage researchers to build upon, adapt, and expand this technology for their own local contexts. Specifically in Brazil, we believe that custom-made hardware and software will better capture the diversity of skin presentations found in our population, ensuring fairer and more accurate diagnosis. And by aiming this technology for implementation on SUS, which serves more than 200 million people, this project will strengthen early detection for all and improve patient outcomes while reducing systemic disparities in access to healthcare.