NHS hospital in West London has taken the longest strides yet in adopting cutting-edge AI technology for skin cancer screening among patients.
Whereas the AI tool held assessments on thousands of patients as urgent cancer needing treatment, the waiting list has been narrowed down to the scope of critical cancers before referring patients to consultants.
For the test, the patient must be subjected to medical photography for suspicious moles and lesions by using only two iPhones with the DERM app developed by a UK company, Skin Analytics, and two or three minutes' time.
The images are sent to desktop machines for a more extensive analysis before the equipment comes to a conclusion. However, it is very seldom that benign patients have discharge without the help of a specialist.
Of the referrals, about 7,000 of them are urgent skin cancers each year, and only about 5% of those end up proving to be cancerous.
"I don't think we'd manage, and patients would be missed or be waiting and wouldn't be getting their diagnosis in a timely fashion."
Checking one of his brother Jeff's moles with the AI tool was best for Jimmy Tovey as he discovered that he was having melanoma. Fortunately, he got the clearance.
"Probably the next day or the day after that I got a phone call, and they just said, 'Mr. Povey, it's nothing—it's a mole, nothing to worry about.'
The AI tool is currently being applied also in 20 other NHS hospitals, and the tool has already diagnosed around 14 thousand cancers in the UK.
"As Roger Chinn, chief medical officer at Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust, said, the anxious waiting time between having a mole or skin lesion and wanting to make an appointment at a hospital and actually getting diagnosed is really tough if you're worried about a mole or skin lesion.
We are taking a really big step right now towards more efficient diagnosis and management of skin cancers," and "It means that dermatologists have more time to focus on urgent cases," helping save lives, he said, "and improve the patient experience."
In defense of the claims made, Dr. Lucy Thomas, another consultant dermatologist, added that the AI diagnostic tools would be self-administering at the end of the exercise to patients.
"We want to take this to people so that they would benefit from it."
"At this moment in time, that technology is very limited because you need a dermoscopic lens, which the public wouldn't necessarily have access to, but I'm sure as years go on the technology will be advanced and we will have effective apps focused specifically on the patients in their homes," she said.