Q&A: How Dermatologists Can Utilize the AAD Clinical Image Collection, With Vinod Nambudiri, MD, MBA, MPH

Vinod Nambudiri, MD, MBA, MPH, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital spoke with HCPLive’s editorial team on-site at the 2026 American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, and in a segment of the Skin of Color Savvy podcast spoke about advancing dermatologic education in terms of diversity.1,2

During this interview, included as a segment of the podcast, Nambudiri spoke about the progress made in improving clinical education image diversity and remaining gaps in addressing conditions that disproportionately affect individuals with skin of color. Specifically, he spoke about the AAD Clinical Image Collection, launched in 2025, and its impact on these issues.

In the following Q&A summary, Nambudiri’s responses to inquiries by HCPLive reflected the increasing momentum in the dermatology space regarding both inclusivity and equity:

HCPLive: We are on-site, live at the AAD 2026 Meeting in Denver, Colorado, here with Dr. Vinod Nambudiri, who is going to talk to us a little bit about some different topics today. Would you first describe a little bit about your background?

Nambudiri: Thanks so much for having me here…I am a medical dermatologist based out of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and my clinical work spans medical dermatology as well as the care of patients in oncodermatology or cutaneous oncology. Outside of my clinical work, I also spend a lot of time thinking about medical education, overseeing our residency program for trainees in the Harvard combined dermatology residency system, and I do some administrative work in our hospital related to clinician well-being, as well as thinking about some of the factors that are at play there.

HCPLive: We wanted to talk to you today about the AAD Clinical Image Collection, which is a topic we've discussed a bit before. Could you first go into a bit about the impetus for developing this collection and what kinds of gaps it was designed to fill?

Nambudiri: Sure. The image collection is a several-year process in the making, and the AAD has historically been a wonderful leader in the space of education in dermatology, often viewed as sort of the gold standard of educational materials and products and resources for the training of dermatologists. [This is] both during their clinical training phase, but also lifelong. They also do a lot of work related to patient education materials and such. One of the gaps that was noted, not only in the AAD’s scope of medical education, but really in many forms of resources that exist and particularly dermatology textbooks and other kind of reference materials for educating dermatologists about skin disease, is that there was a real lack of diversity of representation within the teaching materials, within these clinical images.

In particular, one of the things that was lacking was a spectrum of skin tones or skin colors in which various clinical conditions were presented. And in fact, in some cases where skin tones or skin colors were overrepresented disproportionately, that could lead to potential downstream consequences for dermatologists or other physicians having gaps in their knowledge about how diseases present in a variety of skin tones and skin colors. So, with that impetus of really wanting to meet a need for the dermatologist's membership, that was recognized by dermatologists themselves. The Clinical Image Collection was set up by the AAD in order to help address that gap.

HCPLive: How has the collection sort of grown since its launch in 2025?

Nambudiri: We got things off the ground officially in January 2025 with sort of a soft launch, a little bit of buzz. Then by March of 2025, at the AAD in Orlando, at that time, we had our first official welcoming and launch event at that meeting, which was really fantastic. We have a work group of about 8 or 9 members that are involved. All of them are AAD members who are actively engaged in curating this collection. We're very fortunate to be partnering with Skin of Color Society, and they have representation in our work group as well to have inputs from a variety of dermatologists who are passionate about this work.

Since that time, we have grown tremendously. We started with a few dozen images in the collection. As of February of this year, just over a year after our launch, we have over 1800 images in our collection, over 3000 members who have accessed or created an account to access the AAD clinical image collection, and over 65,000 views of the images. So I think we've had tremendous growth in that one year. It's definitely been something that generated a fair amount of buzz within our specialty, and was really celebrated by the leadership of the AAD, which I think has helped champion it to a variety of our members, and has allowed it to grow through the contributions of individual AAD members themselves.

HCPLive: What kind of images are included in the collection, and how can clinicians in dermatology use the collection?

Nambudiri: Fantastic question. We really are wide open in terms of diseases and morphologies. We want this to be a representative collection, meaning everything is fair game when an AAD member goes to submit a clinical photo or clinical image. They tag it to a specific diagnosis, and those diagnoses represent the full spectrum of dermatology. So we have pictures of inflammatory diseases like atopic dermatitis, psoriasis, hydratinitis, and alopecia, the spectrum of inflammatory diseases. We have pictures of skin malignancies, including melanomas, squamous cell carcinoma, basal cell carcinoma, and cutaneous lymphomas. We have pictures that represent chronic conditions in various states.

So, pre-treatment or post-treatment, we have images of infectious diseases of the skin, and so I'd say it really, truly represents a wide spectrum of disease and continues to grow. So those are a handful of the categories of diagnosis that are there. We also have every image in the collection tagged, not only by its diagnosis, but by its skin tone that it represents, essentially light, medium, or dark. That allows for a user to search through it for individual images based on those tagged diagnoses or skin tone, or even the relative age of the patient. Is this a pediatric patient? Is this an adult patient? So, we really hope to make this a usable, user-friendly platform or site for our members to be able to take advantage of.

HCPLive: We also wanted to ask who can use the collection?

Nambudiri: It's open to any and all AAD members. We hope that they are able to take those images and use them to educate, and really quite broadly across the scope of medicine and medical education. Whether that's their own trainees in the field of dermatology, whether it's medical students who are going into any different discipline, whether it is peers and colleagues in other specialties of medicine, maybe an emergency room physician who is diagnosing a rash, maybe an allergist that is diagnosing a drug reaction in the skin, any of these groups of individuals could really stand to benefit from additional clinical imaging that's been vetted and curated by dermatologists to represent disease across a spectrum of skin tones. So that's really the use case.

I know of colleagues who have used images from the collection in talks at the AAD. And that's a great kind of full circle moment here, of something that, like the membership identified that they needed, we created, pushed out to them, and then has now been used to, like, educate more members. I think that's sort of like a really nice, full-circle moment, and we're anticipating more of those as time comes.

HCPLive: What is your hope for expansion of the collection?

Nambudiri: Well, some really exciting news on that front. We are, as I've mentioned, dependent upon members to really engage with us and donate images or upload images to the collection, and we've had really great uptake, hundreds of members who have thus far contributed. But we're very excited that we can announce or that we've been the recipient of a few large donations each, well over 1000 images that will allow us over the course of the next year, as we vet and process and digitize and upload all of these to have our goal over 10,000 of these uploaded into the collection as soon as we're able to so I think that really speaks to this exponential growth that we're able to achieve due to the support of our membership.

The quotes used in this Q&A summary were edited for the purposes of clarity.

References

1. Nambudiri V. Skin of Color Savvy: Updates on the AAD Clinical Image Collection, With Vinod Nambudiri, MD, MBA, MPH. HCPLive. April 14, 2026. Accessed April 29, 2026. https://www.hcplive.com/view/skin-of-color-savvy-updates-aad-clinical-image-collection-vinod-nambudiri-md-mba-mph.

2. Nambudiri V. How the AAD Clinical Image Collection Can Help Dermatologists, With Vinod Nambudiri, MD, MBA, MPH. HCPLive. April 16, 2026. Accessed April 29, 2026. https://www.hcplive.com/view/how-aad-clinical-image-collection-can-help-dermatologists-vinod-nambudiri-md-mba-mph.