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How Dermi Atlas groups a visit's photographs into body-area zones with overview and dermoscopy roles, a review surface, cross-date dermoscopy series, and the clinician-created lesion register.
A visit rarely produces a single photograph of a body area. An overview frame establishes the region, and a set of dermoscopy close-ups records the individual lesions within it. Left as loose images inside a date group, that relationship survives only in filenames and in memory.
Zones give it structure. A zone is one body area photographed on one date, holding its overview photographs together with the dermoscopy close-ups taken alongside them. Zones appear as their own cards in the Image Pool, open into a review surface built for them, and carry the lesion register the clinician assembles on top of them. This article covers creating a zone, the overview and dermoscopy roles, the zone review surface and its navigator, dermoscopy series across dates, the lesion register, tag filtering, and dissolving a zone.
Zones are rendered as cards inside their date group in the Image Pool, ahead of the loose image cards for that date. The pool keeps its existing structure otherwise: a pool with no zones looks exactly as it did before, and images that belong to no zone stay where they were. See Uploading and Organizing Images for the pool itself, its date groups, and its toolbar.
In card view, a zone card carries:
In list view the same zone occupies a single row carrying the thumbnail, the designation, the counts, and the tag chips, and it expands into indented member rows.
Opening a member from a zone card leads to the zone review surface focused on that photograph rather than to the plain image viewer, so a zone photograph is always read with the rest of its zone beside it. Zones captured as part of a full body photography session are the exception: they render inside their session card rather than as standalone zone cards, and they are reviewed on the Full Body Photography page, described in Documenting Full Body Photography Sessions.
A Create Zone control sits on the pool image cards and list rows of images that do not already belong to a zone. It seeds the zone from that image, which becomes an overview photograph of the new zone.
The control opens the Create Zone drawer, subtitled "Group this overview with its dermoscopy close-ups", which holds three inputs:
Confirming with Create Zone creates the zone and adds its card to the pool, inside the date group it was seeded from.
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Every member of a zone holds one of two roles, and the role decides what the photograph can carry.
Overview photographs are the regional frames. They are the only members lesion marks can be placed on: in the zone review canvas, marker placement is available while an overview member is centered and unavailable on a close-up. A zone created in the pool may hold several overview photographs; a zone that fulfills a full body session pose holds at most one.
Dermoscopy photographs are the close-ups. Each can carry a link to one lesion record, which is what groups it under that lesion in the review navigator and in the lesion's own history.
One member is the zone's primary image, shown first on the zone card and used as the card thumbnail in list view. Roles and the primary image are managed from the Zone Image Options drawer, opened from the options control on a member row:
Opening a zone member raises Zone Review, a full-screen surface identified by a Zone Review chip in its header alongside the date switcher and the sync status indicator. It presents three regions.
The member navigator occupies the left side, titled Images with the member count and carrying the zone designation as its subtitle. Members are grouped rather than listed flat: an Overviews section first, then one group per lesion holding the dermoscopy photographs linked to it, headed by the lesion label and its anatomical site, and finally a Dermoscopy section for the close-ups not linked to any lesion. Selecting a card centers that photograph on the canvas; selecting a lesion header selects the lesion in the panels on the right.
The canvas fills the center with the centered member and the annotation tools, including the Mark tool used for lesion marks. Annotation behavior matches the rest of the platform.
The lesion panels occupy the right side: the lesion register above and the Lesion Details record beneath it.
The layout adapts as the viewport narrows. On a narrower screen the navigator gives way to a compact member picker above the canvas, and narrower still the two lesion panels move into drawers reached from a Lesions button and a lesion details button below the canvas, so the canvas keeps a usable size on a tablet.
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The register lists the patient's lesions, with the active ones first. Each row carries the lesion label, its status, a chip counting the photographs linked to it, and a subline reading either the designation of the zone whose overview carries the lesion's mark or, for an active lesion with no mark on the displayed zone, "Not placed". A row in that state also offers Place on Photo while the displayed zone holds an overview, arming the mark tool for that specific lesion.
Two controls shape the list. A segmented All and Zone toggle narrows it from every lesion recorded for the patient to those documented in the displayed zone, with the remainder grouped under an Unassigned heading so nothing becomes unreachable. Once the patient has any removed or resolved lesion, a Show inactive toggle brings those records back into view.
Selecting a row opens its record in Lesion Details:
A lesion is created by marking a photograph. Arming the Mark tool and clicking an overview places a mark; where none of the patient's active lesions is still without a mark on the displayed photograph, the mark creates the next lesion and opens its record, and where such lesions exist, a Mark a lesion chooser offers New lesion or one of them by label and site. Place on Photo starts from the other end, arming placement for a lesion already in the register.
Every lesion record, every mark, and every link between a close-up and a lesion is created by the clinician. Atlas stores those records, groups the photographs beneath them, and navigates between them; it does not match lesions between photographs or across visits.
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Zones are scoped to a date. A follow-up visit produces a new zone carrying that visit's date rather than extending the previous one, so each visit keeps its own overview, its own close-ups, and its own marks, and the earlier record is never rewritten by the later one. A patient's zones sharing a designation form a series, and the review surface treats that series as one browsing axis.
The header of Zone Review carries the date switcher for the series:
Choosing another date swaps the whole surface to that visit's zone: its members, its marks, and its own navigator groups. The selected lesion is carried across, and the canvas centers the new zone's overview holding that lesion's mark where one exists, falling back to the zone's primary image.
That is what makes a dermoscopy series readable across visits. The close-up of a given lesion at the current visit sits under its lesion group in the navigator; one date change and the same lesion's close-up from the baseline visit sits in the same place, so a clinician can follow one lesion visit by visit within a single surface. The lesion record reinforces it from the other direction: the Dermoscopy section holds the linked close-ups of the displayed zone, while History holds every linked photograph across every date in chronological order.
Illustrative demo with synthetic data. Learn more
Links between a close-up and a lesion are made in the record itself. The Add control on the Dermoscopy section opens an Add Dermoscopy sheet offering Upload Images, Add from Zone for an unlinked close-up already in the displayed zone, Add from Pool for an image that belongs to no zone, and Capture on Companion where the Atlas Companion app is in use. A link is cleared again from the options control on the linked photograph, which leaves the image in place as a dermoscopy member of its zone.
The Image Pool tag filter reaches inside zone cards rather than stopping at them. While tag filters are active:
Tags themselves are assigned to the member images in the usual way, and the zone card aggregates them for display. See Tag Management for building the tag library and assigning tags across patients, entries, and images.
View Zone Details opens the Zone Properties drawer, which holds the zone's editable metadata alongside its structural actions:
Dissolving removes the grouping, not the photography. Its confirmation states how many images return to the pool and requires the phrase DISSOLVE ZONE to be typed before it proceeds. Under the standard retention policy the dissolved zone is recoverable from the Deleted Items drawer on the patient record, where it appears under a Zones section with its designation, its date, and its retention countdown, until the retention period ends. Where the account is configured for immediate permanent deletion, the confirmation says so plainly and asks for PERMANENTLY DISSOLVE ZONE instead. Either way, no image is deleted: every member returns to the pool as a loose image. See Configuring Data Retention for Deleted Records for the retention settings behind both behaviors and for recovering deleted records.
Zones put the structure of a visit into the record itself. The overview frame and the close-ups taken with it stay together as one object, the roles say which photograph is the regional view and which are the close-ups, and the lesion register on top of them names what was documented and what was decided about it. Nothing about that structure is inferred: the clinician groups the images, places the marks, links the close-ups, and records the site, the size, the decision, and the status, and each of those changes is written to the activity log against the account that made it, at the depth the deployment's audit logging preference retains.
Because a zone belongs to one date and a follow-up visit produces a new one, the record accumulates rather than being overwritten, and the date switcher turns that accumulation into a single browsing axis. A clinician reviewing a lesion moves from this visit's close-up to the same lesion's earliest close-up in one step, with the marks, sites, and decisions recorded at each visit still attached to their own dates.
Every feature described here is available in Dermi Atlas Professional, the on-premises deployment designed for clinical use. The Dermi Atlas Cloud Demo provides access to core workflows for evaluation, though some capabilities may be restricted.
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The following are synthetic and do not correspond to real patients:
Media is provided solely to illustrate platform functionality and workflows.