Abstract

Currently foot pathologies, like cave and flat foot, are detected by an human expert who interprets a footprint image. The lack of trained personal to carry out massive first screening detection campaigns precludes the routinary diagnostic of these pathologies. This work presents a novel automatic system, based on Neural Networks (NN), for foot pathologies detection. In order to improve the efficiency of the neural network training algorithm, we propose the use of principal components analysis to reduce the number of inputs to the NN. The results obtained with this system demonstrate the feasibility of building automatic diagnosis systems based on the foot image. These systems are very valuable in remote areas and can be also used for massive first screening health campaigns. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.