Artificial Intelligence Shows Promise for Skin Cancer Detection

The same technology that suggests friends for you to tag in photos on social media could provide an exciting new tool to help dermatologists diagnose skin cancer. While artificial intelligence systems for skin cancer detection have shown promise in research settings, however, there is still a lot of work to be done before the technology is appropriate for real-world use. "AI systems for skin cancer detection are still in their very early stages," says board-certified dermatologist Roger S. Ho, MD, MPH, FAAD, assistant professor in the Ronald O. Perelman Department of Dermatology at NYU Langone Health in New York. "Nothing is 100 percent clear-cut yet." One murky area is the skin cancer "scores" that AI algorithms assign to suspicious spots.