New system distinguishes suspicious pigmented lesions from non-suspicious ones
Melanoma is by far the deadliest form of skin cancer, killing more than 7,000 people in the United States in 2019 alone. Early detection of the disease dramatically reduces the risk of death and the costs of treatment, but widespread melanoma screening is not currently feasible. There are about 12,000 practicing dermatologists in the US, and they would each need to see 27,416 patients per year to screen the entire population for suspicious pigmented lesions (SPLs) that can indicate cancer.
Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems have been developed in recent years to try to solve this problem by analyzing images of skin lesions and automatically identifying SPLs, but so far have failed to meaningfully impact melanoma diagnosis.