Artificial Intelligence can detect skin cancer better than dermatologists

An artificial intelligence system can better detect skin cancer than experienced dermatologists, a study has found. Researchers trained a form of artificial intelligence or machine learning known as a deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN) to identify skin cancer by showing it more than 100,000 images of malignant melanomas (the most lethal form of skin cancer), as well as benign moles (or nevi). They compared its performance with that of 58 international dermatologists and found that the CNN missed fewer melanomas and misdiagnosed benign moles less often as malignant than the group of dermatologists. "The CNN works like the brain of a child. To train it, we showed the CNN more than 100,000 images of malignant and benign skin cancers and moles and indicated the diagnosis for each image," said Holger Haenssle, from the University of Heidelberg in Germany.