January 17, 2013

Melanoma apps

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Stuff has a good story about a research study looking at smartphone apps for diagnosing melanoma.  These turn out not to be very accurate: they miss quite a lot of melanomas. The story doesn’t mention the false positives, but they are just as bad. Three of the four apps reported  more than 60% of non-melanomas as of concern, so you might as well just cut out the middleman and get checked properly from the start.

Nitpicking: the study was done at the University of Pittsburgh, which is in Pittsburgh, not in Chicago as Stuff seems to think.  Also, the name of the journal isn’t “Online First”, it’s JAMA Dermatology.

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Vomle Springford

    Hi Thomas,

    I wrote this story, I’m a student journalist and I really value feedback, thanks!

    I should have mentioned the false positives and got the uni/journal details right…was more of a time pressure issue but will note for the future.

    Thanks again!

    12 years ago