Melanoma Early Detection: Big Data, Bigger Picture

Abstract

Innovative technologies, including novel communication and imaging tools, are affecting dermatology in profound ways. A burning question for the field is whether we will retrospectively react to innovations or proactively leverage them to benefit precision medicine. Early detection of melanoma is a dermatologic area particularly poised to benefit from such innovation. This session of the Montagna Symposium on Biology of Skin focused on provocative, potentially disruptive advances, including crowdsourcing of patient advocacy efforts, rigorous experimental design of public education campaigns, research with mobile phone applications, advanced skin imaging technologies, and the emergence of artificial intelligence as a diagnostic supplement.

Keywords: RCM; War on Melanoma; WoM; reflectance confocal microscopy.

Figure 1

War on Melanoma™ Full Spectrum Operations Matrix. This shows different outreach and screening examples by risk class and different empowerment methods by provider type. Different provider types see different proportions of the various risk populations as represented with the heat map matrix. Provider and risk population classes are not the same size as represented by the shaded triangles.