AI outsmarts doctors in detecting skin cancer

An Artificial Intelligence (AI) system has been found to detect skin cancer more accurately than a group of experienced dermatologists from 17 countries around the world, a study said on Tuesday. In the experiment, the team of researchers from Germany, France and the US trained a form of AI 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 harmless moles. When its performance was compared with that of 58 international dermatologists, the CNN missed fewer melanomas and misdiagnosed benign moles less often as malignant than the group of dermatologists, showed the findings published in the journal Annals of Oncology. A CNN is an artificial neural network inspired by the biological processes at work when nerve cells in the brain are connected to each other and respond to what the eye sees.