As Tech Trickles In, Medicine is About to Hit Warp Speed
In the summer of 2008, I noticed a mole on my arm that seemed to be getting bigger.
It was hard to tell, though. I wasn’t sure if it had actually grown — or if I was just freaking out and being a hypochondriac for no good reason — so I decided to have it checked out. Doing so required me to call a clinic, set up an appointment, wait for a few days, and then drive to the doctor’s office. Once I was there, a woman with more than eight years of specialized medical education look a long, hard look at the mole and asked me a series of questions about it — but when it was all said and done, she didn’t have a definitive answer for me. Instead, she just referred me to different doctor who had more experience with melanoma, and the whole process started over again.
It ended up being nothing, but the second doctor told me to keep an eye on it just to be safe. Fast-forward eight years, and I’m still keeping an eye on it — but my methods have become a bit more sophisticated. Now, every few months, I pull a smartphone out of my pocket, fire up an application called SkinVision, and snap a picture of the mole. Within seconds, the app uses advanced image recognition algorithms to analyze the shape, size, and color of the affected area, then compares it to all the pictures I’ve taken in the past to assess my risk of melanoma.
digitaltrends.com
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