The use of mobile devices by health care professionals (HCPs) has transformed many aspects of clinical practice. Mobile devices have become commonplace in health care settings, leading to rapid growth in the development of medical software applications (apps) for these platforms. Numerous apps are now available to assist HCPs with many important tasks, such as: information and time management; health record maintenance and access; communications and consulting; reference and information gathering; patient management and monitoring; clinical decision-making; and medical education and training.
Researchers at Stanford University have created an AI algorithm that can examine moles or other marks on the skin by a dermatologist to determine if it has skin cancer. AI System’s Skin Cancer Diagnoses Was Just as Accurate as Dermatologists.
In hopes of creating better access to medical care, Stanford researchers have trained an algorithm to diagnose skin cancer. Deep learning algorithm does as well as dermatologists in identifying skin cancer.
Universal access to health care was on the minds of computer scientists at Stanford when they set out to create an artificially intelligent diagnosis algorithm for skin cancer. They made a database of nearly 130,000 skin disease images and trained their algorithm to visually diagnose potential cancer. From the very first test, it performed with inspiring accuracy.
The final product, the subject of a paper in the Jan. 25 issue of Nature, was tested against 21 board-certified dermatologists. In its diagnoses of skin lesions, which represented the most common and deadliest skin cancers, the algorithm matched the performance of dermatologists.
The algorithm was fed each image as raw pixels with an associated disease label. Compared to other methods for training algorithms, this one requires very little processing or sorting of the images prior to classification, allowing the algorithm to work off a wider variety of data.
Smartphones, with their compact computing power, are allowing more and more patients to get care and diagnostics outside of healthcare settings.
New apps for smartphones are available that can diagnose tremors in Alzheimer’s patients and signal the need for medication, while another supports people with depression during its onset.
