SkinCaRe: A Multimodal Dermatology Dataset Annotated with Medical Caption and Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

With the widespread application of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly deep learning (DL) and vision large language models (VLLMs), in skin disease diagnosis, the need for interpretability becomes crucial. However, existing dermatology datasets are limited in their inclusion of concept-level meta-labels, and none offer rich medical descriptions in natural language. This deficiency impedes the advancement of LLM-based methods in dermatologic diagnosis. To address this gap and provide a meticulously annotated dermatology dataset with comprehensive natural language descriptions, we introduce SkinCaRe, a comprehensive multimodal resource that unifies textitSkinCAP and textitSkinCoT. SkinCAP comprises 4,000 images sourced from the Fitzpatrick 17k skin disease dataset and the Diverse Dermatology Images dataset, annotated by board-certified dermatologists to provide extensive medical descriptions and captions. In addition, we introduce SkinCoT, a curated dataset pairing 3,041 dermatologic images with clinician-verified, hierarchical chain-of-thought (CoT) diagnoses. Each diagnostic narrative is rigorously evaluated against six quality criteria and iteratively refined until it meets a predefined standard of clinical accuracy and explanatory depth. Together, SkinCAP (captioning) and SkinCoT (reasoning), collectively referred to as SkinCaRe, encompass 7,041 expertly curated dermatologic cases and provide a unified and trustworthy resource for training multimodal models that both describe and explain dermatologic images. SkinCaRe is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/yuhos16/SkinCaRe.