A.I. detects skin cancer better than dermatologists in international study

Skin cancer detection won't be turned over to machines anytime soon, but artificial intelligence detected skin cancer more accurately than a large group of international dermatologists in controlled testing, Agence France Presse reports. In an academic study and clinical trial published in Annals of Oncology, the study's lead author, Professor Holger A. Haenssle, of the University of Heidelberg Department of Dermatology, wrote, "Most dermatologists were outperformed by the CNN. Regardless of any physician's level of experience, they may benefit from assistance by a CNN's image classification." The study pitted 58 dermatologists from 17 countries against a deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN). Prior to the test, researchers from Germany, France, and the U.S. taught the CNN to differentiate benign skin lesions from dangerous melanomas. In the process, the team showed more than 100,000 images of correctly identified skin cancers to the neural network, which was designed with Google's Inception v4 CNN architecture.