AI identifies people with sharply elevated risk of skin cancer within 5 years
A skin cancer diagnosis can seem to arrive out of nowhere. But buried in years of health records, prescription histories, and demographic data, researchers say there may be clues that help flag people at especially high risk before melanoma appears. That is the idea behind a large Swedish study that tested whether artificial intelligence could sort through routine healthcare registry data and identify adults more likely to develop melanoma within five years. The work drew on records from more than 6 million people, making it one of the broadest efforts yet to use national population data for melanoma risk prediction. During the five-year study window, 38,582 of the 6,036,186 adults in the dataset developed melanoma, including melanoma in situ. That amounts to about 0.64% of the population studied. “Our study shows that data which is already available within healthcare systems can be used to identify individuals at higher risk of melanoma,” said Martin Gillstedt, a doctoral student at the University of Gothenburg’s Sahlgrenska Academy and a statistician at Sahlgrenska University Hospital’s Department of Dermatology and …
