MnRI Seminar: Noah Goldfarb

The potential role of artificial intelligence for hidradenitis suppurativa severity assessment

Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) is a painful, devastating inflammatory skin condition characterized by inflammatory nodules, abscess and draining tunnels that significantly effect patients’ quality of life. HS is fairly common condition, with a prevalence of 0.1% in the Unites States. Currently, only one medication is federal drug administration (FDA) approved for the treatment of HS.

The overarching goal of the proposed study is to determine whether AI is capable of improving the accuracy and reliability of HS severity and activity assessments for the use in clinical trials. The initial stage will be training the algorithm with images from a single location, the axilla. If successful, future studies will incorporate other locations of the body to create an HS AI severity assessment tool which can be validated for clinical trial use.

About Dr. Noah Goldfarb

Dr. Noah Goldfarb graduated from SUNY Stony Brook School of Medicine in 2009 and completed a combined residency in internal medicine and dermatology in 2014. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota in the Departments of  Medicine and Dermatology and staff physician at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System. Dr Goldfarb’s clinical interests include autoimmune skin diseases, hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) and complex medical dermatology.

He runs an HS specialty clinic and combined rheum-derm clinic at University site and continues to attend as a hospitalist at the VA, working with medical students and residents. Dr. Goldfarb is also passionate about education. He is the medical student coordinator at the VA, the dermatology interest group advisor at the University of Minnesota, the Dermatology Pathophysiology Discipline Director for the Human Health & Disease 3 Course (HHD3) for second year medical students and the Residency Program Co-Director for the Combined Internal Medicine/Dermatology program.