Your smartphone could soon be the first step for diagnosing skin cancer

If caught early, skin cancer isn't particularly deadly. But unfortunately for many, signs and symptoms go unnoticed until health has irreversibly deteriorated. Research findings published in Nature today hint at a future where anyone, anywhere, might be able to perform a basic skin cancer screening on a smartphone. Utilizing machine learning, a Stanford team, including Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, was able to match the accuracy of dermatologists at identifying skin cancer. The classifier the group built is in no way a panacea offering people a precise and irrefutable cancer diagnoses.