Why go to the hospital at all? Just take the photo at home.
Google announced this in 2021, but never released it AFAICT: https://blog.google/technology/health/ai-dermatology-preview...
AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital
21–30 of 91 posts
Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital
#22Why go to the hospital at all? Just take the photo at home.
As someone with a phenotype more subject to skin cancer, I have been using an app called SkinVision for years. From my anecdotal experience it tends to flag the same moles as dermatologists do, and they have actual dermatologists review images where the model has low confidence, so overall pretty happy with it. Note that I am not affiliated with them in any way.
Interesting information snipped from their website .... I'm in Australia so will try it out. Yes specifically says its not available in US
About SkinVision SkinVision was founded in 2012 and provides a mobile phone application, which supports individuals with the early detection of the most common forms of skin cancer (melanoma, squamous cell carcinoma, basal cell carcinoma, and precancerous actinic keratosis). SkinVision is the first CE marked skin cancer application based on extensive clinical trials, conducted in partnership with Erasmus Medical Center (EMC) and the university clinic of Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU). Research shows the app has a sensitivity of 95% and a specificity of 78%. The SkinVision app is commercially available worldwide on iOS and Android except for a few countries, such as the United States and Canada. SkinVision is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
The SkinVision Service is a Medical Device and is registered with the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).
Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital
#23Anecdotally, when I had a potential skin cancer checked at a London hospital they were completely ill-prepared. When I came back to Australia, it was checked and immediately removed as an obvious melanoma. Perhaps the idea of Comparative Advantage also applies to healthcare between countries with natural variances to types of disease?
Being a pasty Brit, going to Australia was a real eye opener in how much more on the ball they were about skin cancer, not just in medical terms but culturally. We're getting better here (I was there more than a decade ago) but it's still seen as quite amusing when people get sunburnt here.
Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital
#24Anecdotally, when I had a potential skin cancer checked at a London hospital they were completely ill-prepared. When I came back to Australia, it was checked and immediately removed as an obvious melanoma. Perhaps the idea of Comparative Advantage also applies to healthcare between countries with natural variances to types of disease?
Sadly, a friend of mine died from this type of problem. He traveled from Ghana to Jordan and fell ill in Jordan, the Jordanian doctors didn't diagnose it as malaria in time to save him because Jordan doesn't have malaria. I'm sure it would have been obvious to a Ghanaian doctor.
Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital
#2599% accuracy in diagnosing benign case This is meaningless. The only thing that matters in this kind of application is false negative rate at some acceptable false positive rate. I assume whoever is working on this knows that, so this is mostly a criticism of the article. That said, this is a horrible use of AI.
Not really. It allows you to order your cases from most-likely to least-likely, and get human eyeballs on the most-likely cases first.
Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital
#2699% accuracy in diagnosing benign case This is meaningless. The only thing that matters in this kind of application is false negative rate at some acceptable false positive rate. I assume whoever is working on this knows that, so this is mostly a criticism of the article. That said, this is a horrible use of AI.
What do you mean by this being a "horrible" use of AI? (Although as another commenter has mentioned, this should more properly be called ML).
It's quite easy to correctly classify 100% of benign cases as benign.
Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital
#27This is ML. I guess AI term can apply here but I think it's a bit disingenuous to advertise as such. People will conflate the term with llm chat bots. https://skin-analytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Artifi...
What is AI to you? Neural nets only? LLMs?
I still have my textbook from almost 20 years ago: "Artificial Intelligence: A modern" by Peter Norvig. Lots of topics covered as AI there that surely do not meet your definition.
Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital
#28This is ML. I guess AI term can apply here but I think it's a bit disingenuous to advertise as such. People will conflate the term with llm chat bots. https://skin-analytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Artifi...
What is AI to you? Neural nets only? LLMs? I still have my textbook from almost 20 years ago: "Artificial Intelligence: A modern" by Peter Norvig. Lots of topics covered as AI there that surely do not meet your definition.
AI is buzzword bingo and has been since introduced to computing in the 60's.
Just clasify the method used as what it is to a supposedly educated crowd. There is no need to classify a marketing term. And yes, for that book it's also just marketing.
Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital
#29> The hospital gets about 7,000 urgent skin cancer referrals each year, but only 5% turn out to be cancer. It seems to be that you could be doing a _much_ better job of filtering this pipeline before it gets to this point. How can so many _urgent_ cases end up being negative? They're using AI to solve a problem that probably shouldn't exist.
And why are skin cancers being referred to a hospital at all? Personal experience in the US... treatment can be done on the spot at the primary dermatologist's office (curettage usually) or referred either to a Mohs specialist or a plastic surgeon (both of whom usually treat at their office). Short of a melanoma that's progressed/metastasized, I don't think I've ever heard of a skin cancer being treated at a hospital…
I don't really know anything about the UK medical system, but my guess is comparing it with how the US works isn't a good fit.
Just doing a quick google search on dermatologists in the UK mostly pointed at hospitals that offered the service, so may have something to do with that.
Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The referral is just because a non expert can't be sure. The cost of the referral is relatively small, but the cost of getting it wrong is large. Someone I know recently had a referral - it's pretty light touch, you just get a prompt appointment, and they do a minor op to remove the mole, and send it to the lab for testing. Luckily in their case, it wasn't cancer. But nothing in the process seemed weird, it was just…
Do all cases in the UK start with a GP? No ability to go straight to a dermatologist? And are all dermatologists based out of hospitals? In the US, we'd just go straight to a dermatologist, who would either remove it on the spot, or for a location that's liable to scar badly, refer to a specialist surgeon. For somebody fair skinned with lots of sun damage like myself, it's an annual "ritual".
Most UK health stuff starts with a GP appointment.
Even for private health care, you usually see a GP first (could be a private GP or NHS, in-person or video) and they then refer you to the next thing whatever that may be. ( N.B. that a NHS GP can give you a referral that you use for private treatment)
There are some things you can just straight up book an appointment for yourself without a referral from a GP, but 95% of the time you start with a GP.
No idea specifically about dermatologists, but my expectation would be that would be the sort of thing that would need a referral for. Perhaps for some "non-medical" procedures and 100% for cosmetic procedures you don't need a referral, but anything even tangentially close to The C Word would almost certainly be sending you down the normal channels.