University of Basel · University Hospital Basel

Reading skin disease
with computation, biology,
and the clinic.

The Navarini Lab builds artificial intelligence for dermatology, grounds it in the biology of inflammatory skin disease, and tests it where it matters — in patient care. One group, three vantage points on the same question: how do we see skin disease more clearly?

Start with the AI work ↓

01

Artificial Intelligence

Digital Dermatology · Department of Biomedical Engineering

Foundation models and computer vision that learn the visual language of skin — built to generalise across every skin tone and to work alongside clinicians rather than replace them.

Dermatology foundation models

research

Scalable, self-supervised vision models pretrained on large, heterogeneous skin-image collections — a shared backbone for diagnosis, segmentation, and retrieval.

PASSION

open data

An open dataset of pigment-rich paediatric skin disease from Sub-Saharan Africa — 4,901 images from 1,653 patients — closing the diversity gap in dermatology AI. (MICCAI 2024)

Fairness across skin tones

published

Datasets and methods that measure and correct how skin-tone imbalance degrades model performance — so tools work for everyone.

Augmented intelligence for skin cancer

clinical study

Clinician-plus-AI melanoma screening, validated at planet scale — including independent validation in Korea. (NPJ Digital Medicine 2025)

AI skin-aging simulation

research

Generative models that show the future cost of sun exposure — a novel, image-driven route to skin-cancer prevention.

02

Biomedicine

Immunology & skin biology · Department of Biomedicine

The wet-lab counterpart to the models: dissecting the immunology and genetics of inflammatory skin disease, and growing living skin to study it in a dish.

Human epidermal organoids

lab

3D cultures of healthy and diseased epidermis — a model of Darier disease and other monogenic keratinocyte disorders, built for high-throughput drug screening.

Severe drug reactions

research

Why some medications trigger life-threatening skin reactions (SJS/TEN) — tracing IL-1 family cytokines and CD8⁺ T-cell–driven keratinocyte death.

Rosacea mechanisms

research

The molecular drivers of a chronic inflammatory disease affecting millions — the antimicrobial peptide LL-37 and JAK/STAT signalling.

03

Clinical

Dermatology & Allergology · University Hospital Basel

Where research meets patients: prospective imaging trials, large clinical registries, and the day-to-day practice that keeps every question honest.

Melanoma & total-body imaging

trial

3D total-body photography (VECTRA) for early melanoma detection in high-risk patients — prospective evaluation of AI-powered whole-body screening.

Pustular psoriasis registry

registry

Deep clinical phenotyping of generalised pustular psoriasis across 500+ patients in Europe and Egypt — flare patterns, comorbidity, and outcomes.

Contact dermatitis & patch testing

clinical

Contributing to the European Baseline Series — tracking emerging allergens across large multicentre patch-test cohorts.

Team

One group across three homes at the University of Basel — the engineering department (DBE), the biomedicine department (DBM), and the clinic (USB).

Prof. Dr. med. Alexander Navarini

Principal Investigator · Chair of Dermatology & Allergology, USB

Digital Dermatology · AI

Philippe Gottfrois

PhD candidate

Fabian Gröger

PhD candidate

Nipun Ranasekara

Researcher

Linda Wermelinger

Researcher

Collaborators · Hochschule Luzern (HSLU)

Prof. Marc Pouly

Professor of Computer Science, HSLU

Simone Lionetti

Lecturer, HSLU

Ludovic Amruthalingam

Lecturer, HSLU

Skin Biology · Biomedicine

PD Dr. sc. nat. Emmanuel Contassot

Laboratory Lead

Rishika Agarwal

Postdoctoral researcher · epidermal organoids

Erika Parente

PhD candidate · organoids & neutrophils

Jane Olivia Fröhlich

PhD candidate · organoids & immune cells

Tanja Dittmar

Laboratory technician

SAITU · Skin Allergy & Immunology Trial Unit

Ivana Cvijetic

Trial Unit Lead

Dermatology rotation resident

Clinical rotation

Dermatology rotation resident

Clinical rotation

+ MD doctoral and master students.

Contact

Dermatology & Allergology, University Hospital Basel
Burgfelderstrasse 101 · 4055 Basel · Switzerland