AI Case Study
Stanford University Medical uses deep convolutional neural networks to predict skin cancer as well as dermatologists
Stanford University Medical trained deep convolutional neural networks on 130,000 skin disease images to predict and classify skin cancer. This is challenging given the variability in the appearance of skin lesions. The model predicted with a similar level of accuracy as dermatologist. The researchers believe this could be used to bring medical diagnosis globally to low income areas with few doctors though the use of edge machine learning on mobile devices.
Industry
Public And Social Sector
Education And Academia
Project Overview
"We demonstrate classification of skin lesions using a single CNN [convolutional neural trained], trained end-to-end from images directly, using only pixels and disease labels as inputs. We train a CNN using a dataset of 129,450 clinical images—two orders of magnitude larger than previous datasets—consisting of 2,032 different diseases. We test its performance against 21 board certified dermatologists on biopsy-proven clinical images with two critical binary classification use cases: keratinocyte carcinomas versus benign seborrheic keratoses; and malignant melanomas versus benign nevi. The first case represents the identification of the most common cancers, the second represents the identification of the deadliest skin cancer."
The CNN achieves performance on par with all tested experts across both tasks, demonstrating an artificial intelligence capable of classifying skin cancer with a level of competence comparable to dermatologists.
Outfitted with deep neural networks, mobile devices can potentially extend the reach of dermatologists outside of the clinic. It is projected that 6.3 billion smartphone subscriptions will exist by the year 2021 and can therefore potentially provide low-cost universal access to vital diagnostic care."
Reported Results
"The CNN achieves performance on par with all tested experts across both tasks, demonstrating an artificial intelligence capable of classifying skin cancer with a level of competence comparable to dermatologists."
"It was assessed through three key diagnostic tasks: keratinocyte carcinoma classification, melanoma classification, and melanoma classification when viewed using dermoscopy. In all three tasks, the algorithm matched the performance of the dermatologists with the area under the sensitivity-specificity curve amounting to at least 91 percent of the total area of the graph."
Technology
"Rather than building an algorithm from scratch, the researchers began with an algorithm developed by Google that was already trained to identify 1.28 million images from 1,000 object categories. While it was primed to be able to differentiate cats from dogs, the researchers needed it to know a malignant carcinoma from a benign seborrheic keratosis."
"Our classification technique is a deep CNN...an image of a skin lesion (for example, melanoma) is sequentially warped into a probability distribution over clinical classes of skin disease using Google Inception v3 CNN architecture pretrained on the ImageNet dataset (1.28 million images over 1,000 generic object classes) and fine-tuned on our own dataset of 129,450 skin lesions comprising 2,032 different diseases. The 757 training classes are defined using a novel taxonomy of skin disease and a partitioning algorithm that maps diseases into training classes."
Function
R And D
Core Research And Development
Background
"Every year there are about 5.4 million new cases of skin cancer in the United States, and while the five-year survival rate for melanoma detected in its earliest states is around 97 percent, that drops to approximately 14 percent if it’s detected in its latest stages. Early detection could likely have an enormous impact on skin cancer outcomes."
"Skin cancer, the most common human malignancy is primarily diagnosed visually, beginning with an initial clinical screening and followed potentially by dermoscopic analysis, a biopsy and histopathological examination. Automated classification of skin lesions using images is a challenging task owing to the fine-grained variability in the appearance of skin lesions."
Benefits
Data
"'There’s no huge dataset of skin cancer that we can just train our algorithms on, so we had to make our own,' said Brett Kuprel, co-lead author of the paper...'We gathered images from the internet and worked with the medical school to create a nice taxonomy out of data that was very messy – the labels alone were in several languages, including German, Arabic and Latin.'"
"...They amassed about 130,000 images of skin lesions representing over 2,000 different diseases."
"We train a CNN using a dataset of 129,450 clinical images—two orders of magnitude larger than previous datasets—consisting of 2,032 different diseases.
During testing, the researchers used only high-quality, biopsy-confirmed images provided by the University of Edinburgh and the International Skin Imaging Collaboration Project that represented the most common and deadliest skin cancers – malignant carcinomas and malignant melanomas. The 21 dermatologists were asked whether, based on each image, they would proceed with biopsy or treatment, or reassure the patient.