Medicine: The final frontier in cancer diagnosis

Abstract

A computer, trained to classify skin cancers using image analysis alone, can now identify certain cancers as successfully as can skin-cancer doctors. What are the implications for the future of medical diagnosis?

Figure 1 |. Accurate cancer diagnosis by computer.

a, Esteva et al. trained a computer to recognize skin diseases using a deep-learning approach in which the computer was presented with 129,450 digital images of medically diagnosed samples. b, To test the diagnostic accuracy level of the trained machine, the computer and 21 skin specialists were presented with previously unseen images representing verified examples of benign or malignant skin disease arising from two cell types. The machine was as successful as or better than the doctors at diagnosing whether or not the images represented conditions that might need further medical attention.