Dermatology: The Next Frontier
/I’m not a fan of dermatology. Not so much because I find skin things weird, but rather I often struggle to diagnose skin conditions. Unfortunately, given that 14% of presentations to a GP involve a dermatological element (1), a significant portion of my clinic is spent puzzling over a mole or rash.
Here to save me are AI-driven medical diagnostics, which have transformed dermatology in recent months. With some platforms boasting 97% accuracy (2) in diagnosing skin cancers, an AI interface between primary care and specialist services could soon be the default in skin pathways.
Major players include Skin Analytics, who lead the field with their AI driven software, DERM, which is the only UKCA approved Class IIa AI as a Medical Device for skin cancer. A skill that used to be the sole remit of consultants with many years experience and learning, can now be performed with astonishing accuracy by a computer.
And the software is democratising in its reach. Platforms like Metaoptima’s ‘Molescope’ offer patients the chance to take high quality photos of their own concerning lesions, to be sent on for further assessment. This is miles ahead of the grainy phone images sent to me at the moment.
With AI taking off, advances are being made at an astonishing rate and these developments are present in almost every medical speciality. From RetinAI’s data processing systems, which give AI driven analysis of retinal OCT images to help diagnose and monitor retinal disease, to the 9 NICE approved AI-driven programs (3), that analyse how best to contour radiotherapy, AI diagnostics are here to stay.
Such advances present philosophical questions about the place of the human physician in all of this. Personally, I have no qualms coming second place to AI when it comes to diagnosing a skin lesion. If it means that diagnostics are safer, quicker and more accurate, I’d go with that system any day. After all, the guiding principle of healthcare is to do good by a patient and if that good is done better, more accurately and safely by a computer, so be it.
In an oversubscribed healthcare system, safe and verified software that takes the burden of diagnosis off a clinician can only be a good thing.