People can use cellphones to catch a slew of skin conditions but questions of accuracy and biases in algorithm databases remain
In a video, 30-year-old Stacey Everson tells the story of how she picked up her phone, snapped a selfie, and saved her own life. She might have easily overlooked the small, irregular mole on her upper left arm. But prompted by friends and family, she took a picture of the growth with an app named SkinVision, and followed up on the app’s recommendation that she see a doctor, urgently. The doctor removed and tested the growth. “A week later, it came back positive for early-stage melanoma,” she says. “Something like that, I wouldn’t have thought it would be cancer.”
Her testimonial is one of several on the product’s website, and SkinVision is only one of several such artificial intelligence (AI)-based apps that aim to help anyone with a smartphone catch a slew of skin diseases – including lethal cancers – earlier than ever. The latest entrant is Google’s Derm Assist, a tool that aims to help users detect more than 288 common skin conditions. Almost 10bn internet users search for terms related to skin conditions each year, says Peggy Bui, a product manager at Google.
Continue reading...source https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/28/ai-apps-skin-cancer-algorithms-darker
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