A future where artificial intelligence will guide skin cancer detection is in sight, experts say, even as human care remains essential.
“The whole ecosystem has really matured and we are now past the hype and the big media headlines,” says Ivy Lee, a Los Angeles-based dermatologist who chairs the Augmented Intelligence Committee at the American Academy of Dermatology.
A 2017 paper in the journal Nature found that an AI model that reviewed 129,450 clinical images outperformed 21 dermatologists when diagnosing skin cancer.
While promising, the paper didn’t consider that a human dermatologist will ask the patient questions about the lesions and touch and feel them, says Veronica Rotemberg, a dermatologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “There’s a lot more about clinical medicine than looking at a photo.”
