Your smartphone could soon be a powerful tool for detecting skin cancer

They'll be some of the weirder selfies you've ever taken, but a study using artificial intelligence to analyze images of skin lesions suggests that smartphones may soon help humans detect skin cancer. Published today in Nature, the study began with an unremarkable image-recognition network provided by Google, pre-trained to identify objects in images. Led by Stanford professor and former Google exec Sebastian Thrun, researchers showed the AI thousands and thousands of medical images--129,450 from Stanford University Medical Center and 18 open-source repositories, to be exact--which are labeled to tell the machine what it's looking at. After looking at hundreds of images of a specific lesion, the AI begins to understand similarities between the images. The algorithm learns to differentiate lesions from healthy skin, potentially based on traits like coloration and contrast.