AI outperforms doctors at diagnosing skin cancer: study - Xinhua

A new study by a team of international researchers has shown for the first time that artificial intelligence (AI) performs better than most dermatologists at detecting skin cancer. The study, published Monday on the journal Annals of Oncology, trained a deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN), a form of AI, to identify skin cancer by showing it more than 100,000 images of malignant melanomas as well as benign moles. They then compared its performance with that of 58 international dermatologists. On average, human dermatologists accurately detected 86.6 percent of melanomas from a set of 100 images, while the CNN algorithm detected 95 percent of melanomas, according to the study. "The CNN missed fewer melanomas, meaning it had a higher sensitivity than the dermatologists," said Holger Haenssle, first author of the study and a professor at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.