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Editorial
December 4, 2019

Problems and Potentials of Automated Object Detection for Skin Cancer Recognition

Author Affiliations
  • 1Department of Dermatology, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
JAMA Dermatol. 2020;156(1):23-24. doi:10.1001/jamadermatol.2019.3360

In recent years we have seen experimental evidence suggesting that neural networks are able to detect skin cancer via dermatoscopic and clinical images.1-4 Most studies used preprocessed and cropped images, in which parts of the background have been removed to fit to a predefined size. Custom preparation of images, however, is not feasible for laypersons or nonspecialists. In this issue of JAMA Dermatology, Han et al5 are opening the stage of automated skin cancer recognition without the need for this type of preprocessing. They applied a technique called object detection on a large data set including a variety of skin diseases.

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