Smartphone-Based Technique for Disease Detection through Finger Nail using Fractal Analysis

There is an increased need for Point-Of-Care (POC) devices since it is challenging to diagnose some diseases in resource-constrained areas. In medical science, professionals meticulously examine the patient's nails to gather important information about their health. Since the human eye is limited in its ability to distinguish between colors, shapes, and textures, digital image processing techniques are employed to assess the condition of the nails to diagnose human health. An important area of the healthcare domain nowadays is non-invasive disease diagnostics. In this work, a patient's fingernail is used to diagnose their medical issues. The major goal of this research is to use a computational platform to immediately diagnose disease from a patient's fingernail without administering any medications. To gather datasets, an image-capturing device has been created. The nail is then evaluated using the fractal dimension technique to look for any disorders. This work aims to give an analysis based on fractals. As fractal theory is based on calculating the roughness of the surface, it can be applied to fingernails. The texture of healthy nails is observed to be smooth and unhealthy nails have a rough texture. The fractal values of healthy nails based on different age groups and different occupational groups using two fractal dimension approaches based on the spatial domain, i.e. box-counting method, and frequency domain, i.e. Fourier fractal dimension method is calculated, and then the liver-diseased nails are compared with healthy nails and analysis is done. For all groups of healthy nails, the fractal value is computed between 1.3 and 1.79, while for nails with liver disease, it is calculated between 1.81 and 1.84 for box-counting dimensions. The fractal value for the Fourier fractal dimension is estimated between 0.013 and 0.034 for healthy nails, while for nails with liver disease, it is computed between 0.058 and 0.066. As a result, this work is used to identify a disease from fingernails. This method is completely noninvasive. Additionally, it resolves the problem of costly facilities not being affordable in remote regions.