This Algorithm Doesn't Replace Doctors--It Makes Them Better

Dermatologist Harald Kittler draws on more than a decade of experience when he teaches students at the Medical University of Vienna how to diagnose skin lesions. His classes this fall will include a tip he learned only recently from an unusual source: an artificial intelligence algorithm. That lesson originated in a contest Kittler helped organize that showed image analysis algorithms could outperform human experts in diagnosing some skin blemishes. After digesting 10,000 images labeled by doctors, the systems could distinguish among different kinds of cancerous and benign lesions in new images. One category where they outstripped human accuracy was for scaly patches known as pigmented actinic keratoses.