The option of receiving a skin-cancer diagnosis by smartphone could save lives, say researchers.
It’s scary enough making a doctor’s appointment to see if a strange mole could be cancerous. Imagine, for example, that you were in that situation while also living far away from the nearest doctor, unable to take time off work, and not sure if you had the money to cover the cost of the visit.
Universal access to health care was on the minds of computer scientists when they set out to create an artificially intelligent diagnosis algorithm for skin cancer, making a database of nearly 130,000 skin disease images and training their algorithm to visually diagnose potential cancer. From the very first test, it performed with inspiring accuracy.
