A Web-scraped Skin Image Database of Monkeypox, Chickenpox, Smallpox, Cowpox, and Measles

Abstract

Monkeypox has emerged as a fast-spreading disease around the world and an outbreak has been reported in 75 countries so far. Although the clinical attributes of Monkeypox are similar to those of Smallpox, skin lesions and rashes caused by Monkeypox often resemble those of other types of pox, for example, chickenpox and cowpox. This scenario makes an early diagnosis of Monkeypox challenging for the healthcare professional just by observing the visual appearance of lesions and rashes. The rarity of Monkeypox before the current outbreak further created a knowledge gap among healthcare professionals around the world. To tackle this challenging situation, scientists are taking motivation from the success of supervised machine learning in COVID-19 detection. However, the lack of Monkeypox skin image data is making the bottleneck of using machine learning in Monkeypox detection from patient skin images. Therefore, in this project, we introduce the Monkeypox Skin Image Dataset 2022, the largest of its kind so far. We used web-scraping to collect Monkeypox, Chickenpox, Smallpox, Cowpox, and Measles infected skin as well as healthy skin images to build a comprehensive image database and make it publicly available. We believe that our database will facilitate the development of baseline machine learning algorithms for early detection of Monkeypox in clinical settings. Our dataset is available at the following Kaggle link: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/arafathussain/monkeypox-skin-image-dataset-2022.