How many of us have more health apps than social media ones? Not many, I’d guess. The fact is the majority of health apps out there either give fitness advice or do some tracking of sorts. However, there is one that claims to do something quite revolutionary for a smartphone app: detect the warning signs of skin cancer.
SkinVision is the name of the bold app, available on iOS and Android. If you haven’t guessed already, it’s mechanism relies on artificial intelligence and a user’s camera. Once installed, users have to just open it and take a photo of the areas that are causing them concern. After less than a minute, the AI will assess the risk of cancer the person is exposed too.
The result can vary from low and low with symptoms to high. The criteria taken into consideration are irregular patterns, different coloration, asymmetry, size, and unevenness.
How accurate are the results? After being put to the test, researchers say that SkinVision is 95.1% accurate at spotting the early signs of cancer.
However, the app can not tell the type of cancer the person is dealing with and should not replace a proper, medical consult. It is simply not a diagnosis tool but “a risk assessment and recommendation” software.
Finally, its goal is to reduce the number of unnecessary visits to the physician, a spokesperson told Digital Trends: “Literature shows that suspicious skin spots are one of the most common reasons patients visit a general practitioner, and a high percentage of these visits can indicate a benign lesion. SkinVision hopes that the use of the app can reduce unnecessary visits, freeing up GPs to run their practice efficiently to see more patients. The cost for treatment of early-stage skin cancer is drastically different from late-stage skin cancer, which can require expensive treatment such as immunotherapy.”
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