[HN Gopher] AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital
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AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital
Author : chris_overseas
Score : 55 points
Date : 2025-04-12 07:43 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| xenospn wrote:
| Why go to the hospital at all? Just take the photo at home.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Article says medical photographers take the pictures. I'd guess
| a future iteration will have the app direct the patient to take
| the pictures.
| onename wrote:
| I assume if you get a positive response you will want to speak
| with doctor about it
| zamadatix wrote:
| If the thermometer says 39 C/102 F I will want to speak with
| a doctor about it but that doesn't mean I want to go to the
| hospital every time I want my temperature checked.
|
| I suspect it has a lot more to do with these lines:
|
| > medical photographers taking photos of suspicious moles and
| lesions
|
| I.e. it might not be ready enough or validated for an average
| person snapping their own photo and:
|
| > The images are then transferred to a desktop computer for
| greater analysis before the tool determines the result
|
| There is more to it than the phone app and it may not be
| packaged in a way that is currently worthwhile to distribute
| to home users.
|
| Both of these (and other things) may change with time of
| course.
| charleshn wrote:
| 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.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Looks like it's not available in the US unfortunately.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| 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).
| ajb wrote:
| Because you don't know what the lighting is, what the sensor
| is, and what kind of shit the camera app and ISP are doing to
| the image without telling you
|
| I recently tried to show some images to a vet. Something in my
| phone fucked up the amount of red in the image, making them
| useless (guess what, figuring out how much blood is present is
| pretty important for medical applications)
|
| Probably at some point we will all have a separate medical
| camera with specified response and with a specified led
| illuminator. Apple will probably get their phone certified in
| some medical camera mode. Right now I don't think phone cameras
| can be trusted
|
| Not all applications need accurate colour, (no idea about
| cancer checks) but some really do.
| darrenf wrote:
| 4 years ago I had my partner take photos of moles that had
| changed colour on my back. I used the MySkinDoctor app
| https://www.myskindoctor.co.uk/ to send them to my consultant
| dermatologist (who, at the time, I had never met -- having just
| moved to a new area). Upon review they arranged for an in-
| person appointment and I was seen within a week or so. All
| through the NHS.
|
| So yes, taking the photo at home is perfectly doable. I still
| went to hospital though.
| graemep wrote:
| I develop the backend for that. Nice to hear it worked well
| for you.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Google announced this in 2021, but never released it AFAICT:
| https://blog.google/technology/health/ai-dermatology-preview...
| stubish wrote:
| One of the problems with these sorts of machine learning
| applications, including this exact use case elsewhere, is that
| they have been extremely sensitive to the imaging equipment
| used. Train it on a dataset of images from one source and it is
| only accurate on images from that source. Possibly only
| accurate on images from the exact same device. For home use, it
| needs a huge training set of images taken by all sorts of
| devices in all sorts of lighting conditions. And then the
| system will need to be improved until the error rates become
| useful.
| floppydiscen wrote:
| This would be such a beautiful use of AI
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| I last heard it's _a pretty darn helpful tool_ , from a
| radiologist acquaintence/undergrad friend (who works from home
| in USA).
| andy99 wrote:
| 99% 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.
| greazy wrote:
| I went searching for more. The tool is called DERM by Skin
| Analytics. They have more info on stats:
|
| https://skin-analytics.com/ai-pathways/derm-performance/
|
| A few peer reviewed pubs down the bottom of the page
| frereubu wrote:
| 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).
| jampekka wrote:
| It's quite easy to correctly classify 100% of benign cases as
| benign.
| flir wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's really all about the protocol. AI tends to spot things
| that doctors don't, and vice versa. Dermatology is also an area
| being pillaged by private equity and access is poor for many
| people.
|
| I lost my wife to melanoma. She noticed a lesion within days of
| it appearing, and a doctor saw it within 48 hours and felt it
| was benign. My wife didn't accept it and had a plastic surgeon
| remove it and biopsy, then had a margin removed by surgical
| oncologist, the standard of care at the time. It came back as a
| brain tumor 4 years later and she was gone in 6 months, even
| with the incredible advancements today.
|
| So I'd hold the position strongly that anything that improves
| overall detection rates and access to care is incredibly
| important and will save lives. Weeks matter with melanoma.
| Today with immunotherapy Molly would be fine. But if she hadn't
| advocated and gotten the original thing removed, it would have
| cost her 4 important years.
| tomcam wrote:
| So sorry, brother.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| I've been told the only way to be sure if skin cancer or not
| , is a biopsy. I also have been told ... not skin cancer...
| but Dr decided to send me to a dermatologist. Is thing he
| said when say it .. is looks like skin cancer ... lets take a
| biopsy now ... to check . It was skin cancer ... a BCC
| greazy wrote:
| This 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...
| verst wrote:
| 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.
| consp wrote:
| 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.
| ircshotty wrote:
| Anecdotally, 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?
| frereubu wrote:
| 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.
| femto wrote:
| Awareness started in the 1980s in Australia with Sid the
| Seagull:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGgn5nwYtj0
|
| https://www.abc.net.au/btn/classroom/sun-safety-
| campaign/103...
| qq66 wrote:
| 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.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Friend did a lot of work in Africa. Got back to the US and
| starts getting symptomatic and says to himself "I think I got
| malaria".
|
| Goes to the biggest university hospital nearby he can find.
|
| Was initially dismissed but waited it out for the infectious
| diseases specialist and they quickly agreed with his self-
| diagnosis.
|
| They kept them in hospital for a few days so a parade of
| clinical students/residents could come by for the specialist
| to say: "this man has malaria"
| ghaff wrote:
| I came back from Bali and shortly after came down with a
| really high fever when I was on vacation in Maine. When I
| got home week later called my primary as I was still
| running a bit of a fever and got blood work which was
| pretty bad. Went to ER and my primary care figured it was
| something tick related. The infectious disease guy on call
| immediately identified as Dengue Fever. At the end,
| including sending blood to the Louis Pasteur Institute in
| Paris I spent something south of $1K to get told I'd
| recover on my own--the Paris tests came back like weeks
| later--and there really wasn't much they could do.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| Australia, Queensland, Brisbane has the highest incidence of
| skin cancer in World. So Drs and dermatologists would have more
| experience detecting it here. UV is probably much less intense
| in England . This link graph shows skin cancer is over 2x in
| Australia
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1032114/countries-with-t...
| Tade0 wrote:
| It's even more granular than that.
|
| My neighbour who is a doctor moved to another city because
| that's where he managed to get a spot to train for his field.
|
| It appears that he's learning much more there than he would
| back home because in this country some procedures are rare
| outside of his current location.
| timewizard wrote:
| > 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.
| RobinL wrote:
| 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 the way of the GP escalating
| it because they couldn't be sure. Hypothetically, if the AI had
| been able to diagnose with higher certainty than the GP, all of
| this could have been avoided, so definitely room for
| improvement.
| alistairSH wrote:
| 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".
| mattlondon wrote:
| 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.
| alistairSH wrote:
| 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 (not
| saying it doesn't happen, only that that would be an exception,
| based on personal/family/friend experiences).
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| rplnt wrote:
| This doesn't seem like nothing new? I remember a talk about this
| being done some 12+ years ago. Just without the AI label to
| generate hype.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| There has been talk about this pretty much since CNNs got good
| at object recognition ~2012.
|
| But healthcare is a rather conservative industry (for good
| reason) so it has taken a while to build confidence in the
| technology and get regulatory approval.
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