Telemedicine has a lot of regulatory hurdles to get to market, but initiatives like this are extremely exciting, since they can likely be taken to market in a way that explicitly clarifies that it's not a diagnostic, it's simply a low barrier way to actually get that mole you've got looked at. If you don't have health insurance, you could actually get an idea of how critical it is to get in to see a doctor. That said, the obvious concern would be the extreme cost of a false negative (although the evidence suggests that the algorithm is no more likely to provide one than a doctor, the concern over single accidents caused by self-driving cars, even when the overall rates are far lower makes it pretty clear that the bar for success to the public for non-humans is substantially higher than it is for humans)
> That said, the obvious concern would be the extreme cost of a false negative
Probably not. People won't go to doctor unless they sense something wrong with their body. So it is actually filling the void here.
On the other hand, false positives will cause a bigger problem, because swarm of people will get triggered by the fear of cancer, and hospital might not handle the sudden surge of traffic for treatment.
I think I agree with you from a policy perspective. However, the cost of a false negative has major PR implications (just wait for the first "I tried this algorithm and it misdiagnosed what turned out to be cancer") story. While I totally agree that those stories would be entirely unfair when looking at rates, that's not how it would play out in media response (and unfortunately, regulatory response).
Are people allowed to practice medicine without a license, if they "explicitly clarify that it's not a diagnostic, it's simply a low barrier way to actually get that mole you've got looked at."
I think the same, whatever the law regarding that is, would apply to a person or company providing this service via deep learning.
