AI Beats Dermatologists in Diagnosing Nail Fungus

It's still relatively rare for artificial intelligence to deliver a crushing victory over human physicians in a head-to-head test of medical expertise. But a deep neural network approach managed to beat 42 dermatology experts in diagnosing a common nail fungus that affects about 35 million Americans each year. The latest successful demonstration of AI's capabilities in the medical field relied heavily upon a team of South Korean researchers putting together a huge dataset of almost 50,000 images of toenails and fingernails. That large amount of data used to train the deep neural networks on recognizing cases of onychomycosis--a common fungal infection that can make nails discolored and brittle--provided the crucial edge that enabled deep learning to outperform medical experts. "This study was the first to show that AI has overwhelmed the specialists," says Seung Seog Han, a dermatologist and clinician at I Dermatology in Seoul, South Korea.