Early detection is vital if treatmentis to succeed.
An Innovation project has developed a prototype rapid screening tool for skin cancer into a marketable device. It will enable many more people to be screened, with at-risk cases being referred to a specialist. How it works The heart of the system is a high-resolution camera, specially developed to look at the skin with a magnification of up to 50 times. The computer software to analyse its pictures is based on an artificial neural network which makes decisions in the same way as the human brain. In the development projects, the system was trained to recognise suspicious moles, with over 20,000 skin images collected from people of all ages, races and colouring.