Artificial Intelligence Can Now Detect Skin Cancer Better Than Humans

Artificial intelligence beats experienced dermatologists when it comes to skin cancer diagnosis, according to a study published in the journal Annals of Oncology. Researchers trained a deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN) to distinguish malignant melanomas from benign moles using more than 100,000 photographs. Then, they compared its success rate against those of 58 dermatologists from 17 countries. "The CNN missed fewer melanomas, meaning it had a higher sensitivity than the dermatologists, and it misdiagnosed fewer benign moles as malignant melanoma, which means it had a higher specificity; this would result in less unnecessary surgery," Holger Haenssle, senior managing physician at the Department of Dermatology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, said in a statement. Neural networks are a type of machine learning software that operate a bit like the brain's neural networks.