Background and Objectives: Psoriasis is an auto immune skin disease which afflicts skin by the red plaques that usually are accompanied the silvery-white scales. Various medical treatments are used for this disease that have different impacts on the patients, but there is no definite cure for the disease. The PASI standard is employed to measure the effectiveness of the treatments. It includes four parameters: namely Area, Erythem, Scaliness and skin Thickness. The Area parameter in PASI standard usually is measured by physicians through subjective clinical observations, which are imprecise and boring act and in some cases it leads to diverse results.Materials and Methods: This paper presents a computer-based semiautomatic method to measure the Area parameter in PASI standard. In the proposed method, the user selects a threshold value for the Cr component in YCbCr color space to differentiate the plaques from the skin.Result: This method has the advantage over the previous methods, that is measuring of plaques with silverywhite and plaques of hairy skins and tiny plaques besides simple plaques (i.e., scale-less plaques).

Background: Psoriasis is a skin disease which has genetical origin. In this disease, skin is covered by red plaques and silvery-white scales. PASI standard provides a method for measuring psoriasis severity by evaluating lesion area and three other parameters.Material and Methods: To determine the lesion area on the skin, we have developed an automatic method for segmentation of the plaques. The method isolates healthy and healed skin areas from lesion areas by an edge detection method. We customized the canny edge detection method in CIELAB color space to isolate the plaques from skin.Result: Moreover the simulation results indicate that the proposed method is able to determine lesion areas with accuracy higher than 92 percent for 37 out of 40 cases.Discussion: The advantage of this method is that it can find lesion area in noisy body, face and can remove the hair, eyes and mouth artifacts. Hence, the proposed method is superior to the previous methods and can be effectively used in automatic measuring of the lesion area in psoriasis patients.

Background: Psoriasis is a skin disease which results in red scaly regions in the body. This disease has no well-known definite cure and the proposed medical treatments can only control the disease and reduce its harms. PASI criteria are proposed to measure the effectiveness of the selected treatment on the patients. The PASI criteria consist of four parameters: Area, Erythema, Scaliness and Thickness. The Erythema parameter is usually measured based on subjective methods by the physicians. Subjective measurement of Erythema is time consuming, imprecise and varies if performed by different physicians. Our objective in this research is to propose an automatic objective method to measure Erythema parameter based on image processing techniques.Material and Methods: In our research we employed HSV color space because it has the highest correlation with human perception of colors. We specified the correlated component of HSV representation of the psoriasis patients with Erythema parameter. Consequently we used regression modeling to propose a model for automatic measurement of Erythema parameter using HSV color components. We exploited 56 images from psoriasis patients in our research.Results: The results derived from the proposed method for measurement of Erythema parameter were in accordance with the physicians’ diagnosis in 87% of the cases.Conclusion: The proposed method can be used as a tool for automatic measurement of Erythema parameter from digital images captured from psoriasis patients. Moreover, the measurement can be performed without need to any special device.

Background: Psoriasis is a common chronic skin disease which usually appears as white and silvery spots on the skin. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of berberine on patients with psoriasis.Materials and Methods: This double-blind clinical trial was conducted on 60 psoriasis patients who referred to Imam Khomeini Hospital, Ahvoaz, between July and December 2011. The patients were randomly divided into two equal groups that applied berberine and placebo to the treatment of their lesions twice a day. Lesions severity rate in the patients was assessed 7 times using a Psoriasis Area Severity Index (PASI). Data were analyzed by ANOVA with repeated measurements and Chi-square using SPSS software. Results: After 6 months, severity of lesions showed a significant decrease in the group receiving the berberine cream compared with the placebo group so that the mean PASI score of the group receiving berberine decreased from 3.99 to 2.11 while in the placebo group this decreased from 3.98 to 3.71. Mean difference in PASI score was not significant before receiving the treatment till the third month in berberine and placebo groups, but in the fourth to sixth months it was statistically significant (p=0.013).Conclusion: Berberine cream was more effective than the placebo in reduction of skin lesions of psoriasis patients. Therefore, it is recommended that plant-based drugs, like berberine, be used more besides the main medications of patients.

Background: Psoriasis is a chronic skin disorder that can significantly affect a patient’s quality of life (QoL). The goal of this study was to determine the QoL in patients with psoriasis and to investigate the correlation between the QoL, demographic data, and clinical severity of psoriasis.Methods: This prospective, cross-sectional study was conducted from April 2014 to January 2015. One hundred patients with plaque type psoriasis from the Phototherapy Clinic of Razi Hospital, Tehran, Iran were selected and asked to complete questionnaires.The Psoriasis Area Severity Index (PASI) to measure the severity of psoriasis, and the Dermatology Life Quality Index (DLQI) was used for the assessment of the quality of life.Results: The total DLQI score of the all participants was between 0 and 29 with a mean score of 10.6 ± 6.4. The DLQI scores ranged from “very large” to “extremely large” in 45% of the patients. The mean score was 9.2 ± 6.6 in the male group and 12.1 ± 5.9 in the female group, which showed a statically significant difference (P=0.02). Other variables associated with an impaired QoL were age (P=0.002) and PASI (P=0.01). The impact on QoL was higher in younger patients, and in patients with higher PASI scores.Conclusion: In conclusion, although psoriasis is a benign disorder, this study confirms our initial hypothesis that psoriasis significantly impairs the QoL, which is more pronounced in younger patients, women, and patients with a more severe disease (higher PASI scores).

Background: Psoriasis is a chronic disease with multiple biochemical and vascular abnormalities. Several studies have evaluated circulating levels of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in psoriasis, but none of them evaluated it after reaching a PASI-75 response, as a practical treatment goal. The aim of this study was to evaluate serum levels of VEGF in moderate to severe psoriatic patients before and after treatment compared with healthy controls.Methods: This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences. Fifty-eight patients with moderate- severe psoriasis and 60 age-and gender-matched healthy controls were recruited to this study. Serum VEGF levels (pg/ml) of both groups were measured. We used Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (PASI) scoring to assess disease activity in patients. According to the disease severity, the patients received proper treatment. When they reached a PASI-75 response, serum VEGF levels were measured once more.Results: In our study, the median serum VEGF level was significantly higher in psoriatic patients (before and after treatment) as compared to healthy controls. Moreover, patients showed a significant reduction in their serum VEGF levels after reaching PASI-75. The median time of therapeutic effect (reaching a PASI-75 response) was four months. Furthermore, our study showed a significant correlation between the serum VEGF level and age, BMI, PASI, and disease duration (P<0.05).Conclusion: A PASI-75 response is believed to be a non-invasive assessment tool for evaluation of the treatment response. Using the PASI-75 response for evaluation or prediction of the reduction of VEGF levels could provide further clinical benefits.