JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Skin cancer is a growing public health problem. Early and accurate detection is important, since prognosis and cost of treatment is highly dependent on cancer stage at detection. However, access to specialized health care professionals is not always straightforward and population screening programs are unlikely to become implemented. Furthermore, there is a wide margin for improving efficiency of skin cancer diagnostics. Namely, the diagnostic accuracy of general practitioners and family physicians (GPs) in differentiating benign and malignant skin tumors is relatively low. Both access to care and diagnostic accuracy fuel the interest in developing smartphone applications (SAs) equipped with algorithms for image analyses of suspicious lesions to detect skin cancer. Based on a recent review, seven smartphone apps claim to do image analyses for skin cancer detection, but as of October 2018, only 3 seem to be active. They have been criticized in the past due to their lack of diagnostic accuracy. Here we review the development of the SkinVision smartphone application (SVA) which has more than 900,000 users worldwide. The latest version of SVA (October 2018) has a 95% sensitivity (78% specificity) to detect skin cancer. The current accuracy of the algorithm may warrant the usage of this SA as an aid by lay users or general practitioners. Nonetheless, in order for mHealth apps to become broadly accepted, further research is needed on its health impact both for the health system and in the population. Ultimately, mHealth apps could become a powerful tool to curb healthcare costs related to skin cancer management, and minimize the morbidity of skin cancer in the population.