用手機APP診斷皮膚病變可行嗎?
New smart phone
apps now let you snap a picture and upload it
for a skin cancer check. Sure sounds a lot easier than
trekking into the dermatologist, right? But a new review of these apps
finds that most of them are not very accurate.
Dermatologists
uploaded 188 images of skin lesions to four different app-based services. The
apps, which are unregulated, mostly use algorithms to judge—often in less
than a minute—whether the spot is benign or something to get checked out. Three of the four apps failed to
catch at least one-in-three known cases of melanoma. The apps also falsely
identified plenty of benign growths as possibly cancerous. The findings are in the
journal JAMA Dermatology. [Joel Wolf et al., Diagnostic Inaccuracy of
Smartphone Applications for Melanoma Detection]
The fourth app,
which did okay, actually used board-certified dermatologists to review images.
It was the most expensive at five bucks per assessment and took 24 hours.
So next time
you're worried about a mole, don’t use an app, get an ap—pointment…with a
dermatologist.
—Katherine Harmon
[The above text is
a transcript of this podcast.]
沒有留言:
張貼留言