AI rivals dermatologists at spotting early signs of skin cancer

Deep learning is taking on dermatology. An algorithm trained in image recognition has matched dermatologists in its ability to identify certain types of skin cancer based on photographs of skin lesions. "I'm certain this is how melanomas are going to be identified in the future," says Richard Weller, a consultant dermatologist at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in the UK, who was not involved in the work. Researchers led by Andre Esteva and Brett Kuprel at Stanford University trained a neural network on more than 129,000 images of skin lesions associated with 2000 different diseases. They then pitted it against 21 certified dermatologists on new sets of images to find out whether deep-learning algorithms could reliably pick out cancerous moles and lesions.