AI can better detect skin cancer

Berlin, May 29: An artificial intelligence system can better detect skin cancer than experienced dermatologists, a study has found.

Researchers trained a form of artificial intelligence or machine learning known as a deep learning convolutional neural network ( CNN) to identify skin cancer by showing it more than 100,000 images of malignant melanomas ( the most lethal form of skin cancer), as well as benign moles ( or nevi).

They compared its performance with that of 58 international dermatologists and found that the CNN missed fewer melanomas and misdiagnosed benign moles less often as malignant than the group of dermatologists.

“The CNN works like the brain of a child. To train it, we showed the CNN more than 100,000 images of malignant and benign skin cancers and moles and indicated the diagnosis for each image,” said Holger Haenssle, from the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

“After finishing the training, we created two test sets of images from the Heidelberg library that had never been used for training and therefore were unknown to the CNN,” said Haenssle.

“One set of 300 images was built to solely test the performance of the CNN. Before doing so, 100 of the most difficult lesions were selected to test real dermatologists, he said.

Dermatologists from around the world were invited to take part, and 58 from 17 countries around the world agreed.

They were asked to first make a diagnosis of malignant melanoma or benign mole just from the dermoscopic images ( level I) and make a decision about how to manage the condition — surgery, short- term follow- up, or no action needed.