Artificial intelligence identifies skin cancer as well as trained doctors

It's scary enough making a doctor's appointment to see if a strange mole could be cancerous so imagine you were in the middle of nowhere, couldn't take time off work or didn't have the money to see a doctor for a diagnosis. Now, thanks to a team at Stanford University you'll be able to whip out your phone, use an app and get a free, instant diagnosis. Universal access to low cost, let alone free health care, certainly in the US is a challenge, and that was on the teams minds when they set off to create an artificially intelligent (AI) algorithm that could diagnose skin cancer as well as a certified dermatologist. In one way this, along with other deep learning breakthroughs, could be one step on the very very long road to democratising healthcare – or at least part of it. In order to build their algorithm the team first made a database of nearly 130,000 skin disease images, and fed them into the algorithm as raw pixels with an associated disease label.