[devy]

> I heard this story recently that at this conference where

> someone has built a machine learning application where you

> can take a picture of a lesion on someone's skin, and it can

> detect instantly whether it's skin cancer with the accuracy

> of the best dermatologists and doctors in the world. So who

> doesn't want that, right?

I wonder what that app is? Is it SkinVision[1] or IBM's proprietary medical techonology from T.J Watson Research Center[2]?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12299930

[2]: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2860758/ibm-detects-ski...

[mbm]

We've been working on this at Georgia Tech. It's an exciting area with a real opportunity to help improve care in dermatology.

Poster: http://mattmay.us/pub/dermfollow_poster.pdf

Paper: http://mattmay.us/pub/dermfollow_final_report.pdf

[a3_nm]

> So who doesn't want that, right?

What about privacy? Doctors in my country (France) are legally obliged to respect the privacy of their patients and the confidentiality of medical data. A third-party cloud service, not so much.

Edit: To be more precise, I'm not saying that medical apps can't be done right. I'm just disagreeing with the implication that an efficient medical app is automatically a good thing.

[teej]

Erm, in the United States we have HIPAA which directly makes "a third-party cloud service" "legally obliged to respect the privacy of their patients and the confidentiality of medical data". Besides, using AI doesn't have to mean using centralized cloud architecture.

[welanes]

Similar apps have been around a while - http://www.wired.com/2015/09/social-network-doctors-swap-gro...

> And finally, if you’re worried about your own gnarly ER visit showing up on Figure 1, the app is very careful about patient privacy. Every time anyone uploads an image, the first thing they do is fill out a consent form. Figure 1 has an algorithm that automatically obscures faces, and tools that let the user erase any pixels containing names, dates, or any other identifying details.

[devy]

Mark Zuckerberg didn't say this app was brand new - he just mentioned that he became aware of it recently.

SkinVision has been around for 5 years. "It was founded in 2011 in Bucharest, Romania based on a PhD study to apply the mathematical theory ‘fractal geometry’ for medical imaging. Fractal geometry simulates natural growth of tissue and is widely used and documented in biology." [1]

[1]: https://skinvision.com/team

[teej]

Figure 1 isn't really the same thing. It's not a diagnostic tool, it doesn't store PHI, and a human reviews every image before it's visible in the app. Figure 1 is closer to Instagram than it is to the Watson stuff which is all HIPAA compliant.

[xorblurb]

A consent form for consenting to what?

[prawn]

I'm sure the same privacy conditions exist here in Australia too. However, when getting my skin checked, I asked the doctor about what she was looking for, out of curiosity. To explain, she pulled up vision of a problematic mole on someone else's file, and their name/details were visible.

[sappapp]

I would like to see the rest of the confusion matrix.

Accuracy is great, but false positive are bad for everyone.