DermAtlas is a broad resource for understanding skin lesions

By Darwin Wan, MS3

During the 1 week whirlwind tour that was my preclinical dermatology course, one of the key points driven home to me was that one cannot get very far in dermatology without looking at lots of pictures. Unlike internal medicine for example, dermatology is largely driven by visual diagnoses, and descriptions such as “dew drop on a rose petal” or “thin clear vesicle on irregular papule” are difficult to understand without actually seeing a photo of a chicken pox lesion.

DermAtlas addresses this by providing a large collection of dermatological images. 384 diagnoses in 40 categories are covered, with some diagnoses containing multiple images. This is especially useful as many other medical apps often only provide a single classical image for a disease, making it harder to recognize non-classical presentations of the same disease.

The content is fairly simply organized. One can narrow the search for images by category and diagnoses, or through simple keywords. As can be seen below, the search for a disease can reveal multiple images which is useful as diseases often will affect more than one area of the body and can have variable appearances.

The images themselves are of good quality. There is a short description accompanying each image.

Overall, DermAtlas is a nice little app with many dermatological pictures. The descriptions can be a bit brief, but this app is meant to be an atlas, and not a textbook. At $7.99, this app isn’t exactly the cheapest, but it is convenient to have an archive of dermatological images at one’s disposal. Alternatively, one can visit the Hellenic Dermatological Atlas online for similar content for free.

Likes:

• Fairly large collection of dermatological images

Dislikes:

• Very brief descriptions of images

Price:

• $7.99

Conclusion:

• DermAtlas is a good collection of dermatological images, but it could benefit from a better description of each image.