Can Machines Really Tell Us If We're Sick?

This week US scientists announced they have developed an algorithm, or a computerised tool, to identify skin cancers through analysis of photographs. Rather than relying on human eyes, the new method scans a photo of a patch of skin to look for common and dangerous forms of skin cancer. The authors report their approach performs on par with board-certified dermatologists to distinguish two forms of cancer, keratinocyte carcinoma and malignant melanoma, from benign skin lesions. The skin cancer diagnostic tool is based on a powerful type of machine learning that extracts information from images. The critical factor in achieving the accuracy and reliability required for a medical diagnostic tool is the large volume of training data the authors have used. This data consists of 129,450 skin images, and a label for each which indicates whether it contains a cancerous region.