AI Better Than Dermatologists At Detecting Skin Cancer, Study Finds (cbsnews.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: For the first time, new research suggests artificial intelligence may be better than highly-trained humans at detecting skin cancer. A study conducted by an international team of researchers pitted experienced dermatologists against a machine learning system, known as a deep learning convolutional neural network, or CNN, to see which was more effective at detecting malignant melanomas. The results? 'Most dermatologists were outperformed by the CNN,' the researchers wrote in their report, published in the journal Annals of Oncology. Fifty-eight dermatologists from 17 countries around the world participated in the study. More than half of the doctors were considered expert level with more than five years' experience. Nineteen percent said they had between two to five years' experience, and 29 percent had less than two years' experience. At first look, dermatologists correctly detected an average of 87 percent of melanomas, and accurately identified an average of 73 percent of lesions that were not malignant. Conversely, the CNN correctly detected 95 percent of melanomas. The study has been published in the journal Annals of Oncology.

Comments

Re:It's a tool, not a profession

[MMC Monster]

I think that it's the canary in the coal mine for many medical fields.

Image processing neural nets are getting more powerful and more accessible for hospitals and (more importantly) large hospital networks.

The ability to scale this so that a primary care physician can take a shot of a lesion and have it identify those that need confirmation with a specialist (versus sending everyone to a specialist) means there's a lower demand for specialists.

This expands well beyond dermatologists. No reason why similar image processing techniques can't be used in radiology, reducing a health system's need to hire more radiologists. Or echocardiogram and electrocardiogram interpretation, freeing up the time of cardiologists (so less cardiologists need to be hired in the future).

I am a cardiologist. Our current MUSE electrocardiogram (EKG) system pre-reads the EKGs and has us correct the interpretations. It's correct probably 95% of the time. I can't wait until a similar system gets that good with echocardiograms. It'll free up our time so we can go home earlier in the evenings.