Jonathan Kentley Discusses Applications of AI in Dermatology

Jonathan Kentley, MBBS, MSc, research fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, highlights the ways artificial intelligence (AI) is being used in dermatology, including smartphone applications.

Transcript

How is AI being used in dermatology?

It's a super exciting time in dermatology and medicine, as artificial intelligence is really coming to the forefront of the way that we're going to practice medicine. Really, the bulk of the research has been on identification of melanoma from images, and there's been a number of papers since 2017 showing that artificial intelligence algorithms are as good or better than dermatologists at interpreting pigmented lesions. Also, this stands for other skin cancers and there's more and more research being published in that area. Even though it's in its infancy, there is more research now into inflammatory skin disease like acne, rosacea, eczema, and psoriasis, so it's a very exciting time. In Europe, there's a few apps and algorithms that now have CE mark, but in dermatology, nothing is yet FDA approved, so anything that's being done at the moment is very much experimental in research.

How are smartphone apps that use AI helping to diagnose and treat dermatological conditions?

I actually did some research recently on smartphone apps. We scoured the Apple App Store, Google Play Store, as well as Google desktop, and actually there's a huge amount of dermatology apps out there, but extremely unregulated. As I mentioned earlier, there's only really 3 that have a CE mark in Europe, whereas the rest are being sort of sold under the guise of being a research tool of education. It's really important that there's a lot more jurisdiction and regulation of the apps that are out there. Beyond skin cancer, there are some proprietary apps that look at acne and suggest topical treatments for acne. Quite interestingly, there are some apps and imaging software that will allow us to do PASI [Psoriasis Area and Severity Index] and EASI [Eczema Area and Severity Index] scoring, which will make it a much better, more objective method of scoring patients.