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Article History

Received: 28 October 2025

Accepted: 30 January 2026

First Online: 7 February 2026

Declarations

:

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: This study was reviewed and approved by the Research Ethics Committee of Shahroud University of Medical Sciences (IR.SHMU.REC.1404.159). We performed retrospective AI/ML analyses on de-identified dermatology images at participating institutions and evaluated performance on a publicly available de-identified dataset. No patients were recruited or contacted; individual consent was not required because only de-identified data were used. The authors did not access, transfer, or centrally store identifiable patient information. In the federated setting, only aggregated model updates and summary metrics were exchanged. Where expert review was conducted, dermatologists assessed de-identified class-level text examples and did not review patient-level cases or identifiable information. All procedures complied with applicable guidelines and regulations. No sensitive personal data were collected from evaluators beyond their rubric scores.