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Show HN: I'm a dermatologist and I vibe coded a skin cancer learning app

429 points by sungam 1y ago

Coded using Gemini Pro 2.5 (free version) in about 2-3 hours. Single file including all html/js/css, Vanilla JS, no backend, scores persisted with localStorage. Deployed using ubuntu/apache2/python/flask on a £5 Digital Ocean server (but could have been hosted on a static hosting provider as it's just a single page with no backend). Images / metadata stored in an AWS S3 bucket.

AbstractH24 1y ago
I just opened this up to see if HN was supportive or hyper-critical of vibe coding in medicine. Since this isn't invasive I'm glad to see its the supportive option.
nasir 1y ago
Learned quite a bit and seems like a basic but necessary thing to know about!
- sungam 1y ago
  Thanks, I'm glad you found it useful. My patients were constantly asking for a way to learn what skin cancer looked like beyond the ABCDE rule and I wanted to try and introduce a gamification aspect to it.
deleted 1y ago
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aegypti 1y ago
Basal Cell Carcinoma is very gross! Think a set number of questions to start with would be good. Not sure if there’s an end point, I drifted off after ~20 or so
- sungam 1y ago
  Good idea will implement this is a future version
k2xl 1y ago
Wow this game just proves to me how difficult your job is. I am basically getting 50%. One or two seemed quite obvious to me as concerning or not but turned out to be the other way
- sungam 1y ago
  It can be challenging but the large majority of skin cancers are fairly obvious and the main reason people don't spot them is because they are not checking their skin regularly and don't have any idea what to look for. Hopefully this app will help patients to learn the basic things to look for.
leetrout 1y ago
Why do the images get a weird offset slice effect on safari on mobile after submitting a guess with the buttons?
- sungam 1y ago
  No idea, I will look into this
agnishom 1y ago
This is a good use of vibecoding. The main "algorithm" to be implemented is very straightforward , and for the hard stuff, we have an expert.
- sungam 1y ago
  Yes I think so - it's a very simple application but I would never have had the time to do it myself. If anyone is interested: Coded using Gemini Pro 2.5 (free version) in about 2-3 hours. Single file including all html/js/css, Vanilla JS, no backend, scores persisted with localStorage.
curtisszmania 1y ago
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jampekka 1y ago
To my eye most of the basal cell carsinomas looked like everyday rashes, pimples or scratches. My correct rate was under chance. This could be hypochondria inducing for many?
- sungam 1y ago
  Basal cell carcinomas can look very similar to other harmless skin lesions. The key thing is that they will not resolve with time and will slowly grow whereas a rash, pimple or scratch will resolve over a few months. Fortunately basal cell carciomas are very slow growing and do not spread elsewhere in the body or cause other health issues and a delay of a few months in diagnosis does not have a big impact on outcome.
jjallen 1y ago
Very cool. I learned a lot as a non dermatologist but someone with a sister who has had melanoma at a very young age. I went from 50% to 85% very quickly. And that’s because most of them are skin cancer and that was easy to learn. So my only advice would be to make closer to 50% actually skin cancer. Although maybe you want to focus on the bad ones and get people to learn those more. This was way harder than I thought this detection would be. Makes me want to go to a dermatologist.
- sungam 1y ago
  Thanks, this is a good point - I think a 50:50 balance of cancer versus harmless lesions would be better and will change this in a future version. Of course in reality the vast majority of skin lesions and moles are harmless and the challenge is identifying those that are not and I think that even a short period of focused training like this can help the average person to identify a concerning lesion.
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
- loeg 1y ago
  I found the first dozen to be mostly cancer and then the next dozen were mostly non-cancer. (Not sure if it's randomized.) (Also, I'm really bad at identifying cancerous vs non-cancerous skin lesions.)
  - sungam 1y ago
    It is randomized so probably just bad luck! FWIW I get a high score and another skin cancer doctor who commented also gets a high score so it is possible to make the diagnosis in most cases on the basis of these images.
- alanfranz 1y ago
  > So my only advice would be to make closer to 50% actually skin cancer. If I were to code this for "real training" of a dermatologist, I'd make this closer to "real world" training rate. As a dermatologist, I'll imagine that probably just 1 out of 100 (or something like that) skin lesions that people could imagine are cancerous, actually are so. With the current dataset, there're just too many cancerous images. This makes it kind of easy to just flag something as "cancerous" and still retain a good "score" - but the point is moot, if as a dermatologist you send _too many_ people without cancer to do further exams, then you're negating the usefulness of what you're doing.
NoiseBert69 1y ago
What happens if I make a picture of my cat with it?
- sungam 1y ago
  Not sure how you would do this but feel free to try!
y-curious 1y ago
Half of these basal cell carcinomas look like picked pimples. Are there any sort of protocols for self screening for carcinomas a la self-testing ones testicles? I've never heard of anything other than the ABCDE for moles
- lukko 1y ago
  Classically, BCC's have a pearly surface and 'rolled' edges, which differentiates them from pimples.
- sungam 1y ago
  Look for any new skin lesion that is not resolving with time especially if persisting for a number of months. You can take photos of different body sites and repeat every couple of months and then put the two photos side by side on a computer screen to look for any difference. If unsure about the lesions that are present then worth getting a full skin check with a dermatologist as a baseline so that you then just need to look for new/changing lesions. Photos of basal cell carcinoma (no affiliation): https://dermnetnz.org/topics/basal-cell-carcinoma https://dermnetnz.org/topics/basal-cell-carcinoma
toledocavani 1y ago
Is there any reputable (reviewed, endorsed) AI model to detect skin cancer? I have a lot of similar moles, and playing with this app make me concern about all of them.
- scotty79 1y ago
  I heard that the good rule of thumb is to be concerned about unique ones. It much less probable that you develop exactly same looking cancer in two unrelated spots.
  - sungam 1y ago
    Yes we call this the "Ugly Duckling" sign
- sungam 1y ago
  Lots of models out there but I would not trust any for diagnosis without review of a dermatologist yet. The challenge is unanticipated edge cases and managing risk/liability/regulation. I have no doubt that if a major AI company focused on this problem then these issues could be overcome with current technology but perhaps the market is not big enough to justify the investment required.
lukko 1y ago
I'm a doctor too and would love to hear more about the rationale and process for creating this. It's quite interesting to have a binary distinction: 'concerned vs not concerned', which I guess would be more relevant for referring clinicians, rather than getting an actual diagnosis. Whereas naming multiple choice 'BCC vs melanoma' would be more of a learning tool useful for medical students.. Echoing the other comments, but it would be interesting to match the cards to the actual incidence in the population or in primary care - although it may be a lot more boring with the amount of harmless naevi!
- sungam 1y ago
  Thanks for your comment. The main motivation for me in developing the app was that lots of my patients wanted me to guide them to a resource that can help them improve their ability to recognise skin cancer and, in my view, a good way to learn is to be forced to make a decision an then receive feedback on that decision. For the patient I think the decision actually is binary - either (i) I contact a doctor about this skin lesion now or (ii) I wait for a bit to see what happens or do nothing. In reality most skin cancers are very obvious even to a non-expert and the reason they are missed are that patients are not checking their skin or have no idea what to look for. I think you are right about the incidence - would be better to be a more balanced distribution of benign versus malignant, but I don't think it would be good to just show 99% harmless moles and 1% cancers (which is probably the accurate representation of skin lesions in primary care) since it would take too long for patients to learn the appearance of skin cancer.
  - jazoom 1y ago
    > most skin cancers are very obvious even to a non-expert and the reason they are missed are that patients are not checking their skin or have no idea what to look for I am a skin cancer doctor in Queensland and all I do is find and remove skin cancers (find between 10 and 30 every day). In my experience the vast majority of cancers I find are not obvious to other doctors (not even seen by them), let alone obvious to the patient. Most of what I find are BCCs, which are usually very subtle when they are small. Even when I point them out to the patient they still can't see them. Also, almost all melanomas I find were not noticed by the patient and they're usually a little surprised about the one I point to. In my experience the only skin cancers routinely noticed by patients are SCCs and Merkel cell carcinomas. With respect, if "most skin cancers are very obvious even to a non-expert" I suggest the experts are missing them and letting them get larger than necessary. I realise things will be different in other parts of the world and my location allows a lot more practice than most doctors would get. Update: I like the quiz. Nice work! In case anyone is wondering, I only got 27/30. Distinguishing between naevus and melanoma without a dermatoscope on it is sometimes impossible. Get your skin checked.
DrewADesign 1y ago
This is awesome. Great use of AI to realize an idea. Subject matter experts making educational tools is one of the most hopeful things to come out of AI. It’s just a bummer that it’s far more frequently used to pump wealth to tech investors from the entire class of people that have been creating things on the internet for the past couple of decades, and that projects like this fuel the “why do you oppose fighting cancer” sort of counter arguments against that.
- sungam 1y ago
  Thanks for your comment - I'm pleased that people have found it useful and definitely only possible because of AI coding. I agree that this is likely to be applicable to non-experts in many different areas.
  - DrewADesign 1y ago
    Absolutely. I hope you’ll encourage your colleagues to follow suit!
- jacquesm 1y ago
  On the contrary. There is a whole raft of start-ups around this idea and other related ones. And almost all of them have found the technical challenges manageable, and the medical and ethical challenges formidable.
  - DrewADesign 1y ago
    I’m not exactly sure what in my comment you’re responding to, here: My appreciation that a subject matter expert is now capable of creating a tool to share their knowledge, that tech investors are using AI to siphon money from people that actually make things, or that good projects like this are used to justify that siphoning?
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      You wrote: "This is awesome. Great use of AI to realize an idea. Subject matter experts making educational tools is one of the most hopeful things to come out of AI. It’s just a bummer that it’s far more frequently used to pump wealth to tech investors from the entire class of people that have been creating things on the internet for the past couple of decades, and that projects like this fuel the “why do you oppose fighting cancer” sort of counter arguments against that." Let's take that bit by bit then if you find it hard to correlate. > This is awesome. Agreed, it is a very neat demonstration of what you can do with domain knowledge married to powerful technology. > Great use of AI to realize an idea. This idea, while a good one, is not at all novel and does not require vibe coding or LLMs in any way, but it does rely on a lot of progress in image classification in the last decade or so if you want to take it to the next level. Just training people on a limited set of images is not going to do much of anything other than to inject noise into the system. > Subject matter experts making educational tools is one of the most hopeful things to come out of AI. Well.. yes and no. It is a hopeful thing but it doesn't really help when releasing it bypasses the whole review system that we have in place for classifying medical devices. And make no mistake: this is a medical diagnostic device and it will be used by people as such even if it wasn't intended as such. There is a fair chance that the program - vibe coded, remember? - has not been reviewed and tested to the degree that a medical device normally would be and that there has been no extensive testing in the field to determine what the effect on patient outcomes of such an education program is. This is a difficult and tricky topic which ultimately boils down to a long - and possibly expensive - path on the road to being able to release such a thing responsibly. > It’s just a bummer that it’s far more frequently used to pump wealth to tech investors from the entire class of people that have been creating things on the internet for the past couple of decades As I wrote, I'm familiar with quite a few startups in this domain. Education and image classification + medical domain knowledge is - and was - investable and has been for a long time. But it is not a simple proposition. > and that projects like this fuel the “why do you oppose fighting cancer” sort of counter arguments against that. Hardly anybody that I'm aware of - besides the Trump administration - currently opposes fighting cancer, there are veritable armies of scientists in academia and outside of it doing just that. This particular kind of cancer is low hanging fruit because (1) it is externally visible and (2) there is a fair amount of training data available already. But even with those advantages the hard problems, statistics, and ultimately the net balance in patient outcomes if you start using the tool at scale are where the harsh reality sets in: solving this problem for the 80% of easy to classify cases is easy by definition. The remaining 20% are hard, even for experts, more so for a piece of software or a person trained by a piece of software. Even a percentage point or two shift in the confusion matrix can turn a potentially useful tool into a useless one or vice versa. That's the problem that people are trying to solve, not the image classification basics and/or patient education, no matter how useful these are when used in conjunction with proper medical processes. But props to the author for building it and releasing it, I'm pretty curious about what the long term effect of this is, I will definitely be following the effort. Better like that?
quantummagic 1y ago
Nice Job. This really highlights that people who obsess in telling us that "AI hallucinates", and "AI isn't intelligent", are missing the point. At the end of the day, it's simply useful, and incredibly empowering.
- sungam 1y ago
  Yes, without AI this app definitely would not exist as I would not have had time to make it. I think that this will apply to multiple other areas within the economy.
  - sky2224 1y ago
    Another thing to add: developers don't have the time or don't want to spend time on apps like this, but it's not like this is anything complicated. This app ultimately amounts to something that has been done millions of times, and so I think it's actually quite empowering for individuals to be able to quickly build mockups of apps like this for themselves without needing to spend upwards of $75/hr to hire some freelance dev to do it for them.
jmull 1y ago
I kind of love the diy aspect of ai coding. A dermatologist a short while ago with this idea would have to find a willing and able partner to do a bunch of work -- meaning that most likely it would just remain an idea. This isn't just for non-tech people either -- I have a decades long list of ideas I'd like to work on but simply do not have time for. So now I'm cranking up the ol' AI agents an seeing what I can do about it.
- asadotzler 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - bitmasher9 1y ago
    This is not a healthcare app, it’s a health education app. This app will never have PII, or be used for treatment/diagnosis. If it goes down tomorrow it will have zero impact on anyone’s healthcare.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    It's not OK to talk this way about people's Show HN projects; this is in the guidelines.
- jmkni 1y ago
  Same, I've had ideas rattling around in my brain for years which I've just never executed on, because I'm 'pretty sure' they won't work and it's not been worth the effort I've been coding professionally for ~20 years now, so it's not that I don't know what to do, it's just a time sink Now I'm blasting through them with AI and getting them out there just in case They're a bit crap, but better than not existing at all, you never know
  - ecocentrik 1y ago
    I'm a big fan of barriers to entry and using effort as a filter for good work. This derma app could be so much better if it actually taught laypeople to identify the difference between carcinomas, melanomas and non-cancerous moles instead of just being a fixed loop quiz.
ziptron 1y ago
Thank you for making this. My dad passed away from squamous cell carcinoma in 2010. In retrospect, through my casual research into the space and tools like this one, it occurs to me that the entire event was likely preventable and occurred merely because we did not react quickly enough to the cancer’s presence.
- sungam 1y ago
  Thanks for your comment - my practice is focused on skin cancer and I see so many patients that bring a photo from many months earlier that shows an obvious skin cancer that could have been treated more easily at an earlier stage. Patient education should enable these to be picked up sooner.
rcruzeiro 1y ago
I’ve learned that basal cell carcinoma can look scarily unremarkable! Would be useful to add some explanation on the defining features that would give it away to a dermatologist.
- sungam 1y ago
  Yes I need to add this along with a tutorial on skin cancer diagnosis. Honestly wasn't expecting anyone to use the app so just did the basics!
minton 1y ago
The zoomed in view is great if you’re commonly examining under magnification, but perhaps a slightly less zoomed view (or ability to switch between each) might make this more practical for common folks.
- sungam 1y ago
  Thanks, I will try to source alternative images for the next version
vindex10 1y ago
Hi! That's really useful tool! I wish it also explained the decision making process, how to understand from the picture what is the right answer. I'm really getting lost between melanoma and seborrheic keratosis / nevus. I went through ~120 pictures, but couldn't learn to distinguish those. Also, the guide in the burger menu leads to a page that doesn't exist: https://molecheck.info/how-to-recognise-skin-cancer https://molecheck.info/how-to-recognise-skin-cancer
- sungam 1y ago
  This is very helpful feedback. I will add some more information to help with the diagnosis and add an article in the burger menu with detailed explanation. Being honest I didn't expect anyone apart from a few of may patients to use the app and certainly did not expect front page HN!
  - jgilias 1y ago
    Hey! Thanks for making this! A bit more polish and this is something I’d make sure everyone in my family has played with. Imagine a world where every third person is able to recognise worrying skin lesions early on.
- jgilias 1y ago
  Also came to the same conclusion. I want a mode where 50% of the set are melanomas, and the other 50% are “brown benign things”.
  - sungam 1y ago
    Will add this in next version!
- addandsubtract 1y ago
  I'm not a doctor, but there's an ABCDE[0] rule of thumb to spot signs of skin cancer: Asymmetry: One half of the spot is unlike the other half. Border: The spot has an irregular, scalloped, or poorly defined border. Color: The spot has varying colors from one area to the next Diameter: melanomas are usually greater than 6 millimeters, or about the size of a pencil eraser Evolving: Changing in size, shape, color, or new symptoms (itching, bleeding) [0] https://www.aad.org/public/diseases/skin-cancer/find/at-risk/abcdes https://www.aad.org/public/diseases/skin-cancer/find/at-risk...
redox99 1y ago
Are there an equal amount of cancer and non cancer images? In my case the vast majority (I'd say around 75%) are cancerous.
- sungam 1y ago
  You are right - the distribution is not equal largely because the dataset that I used had less pictures of harmless moles but I will aim to make it 50:50 in the next version
stefantalpalaru 1y ago
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rfrey 1y ago
Perfect use of AI assisted coding - a domain expert creating a focused, relatively straightforward (from a programming perspective) app. @sungam, if your research agenda includes creating AI models for skin cancer, feel free to reach out (email in profile), I make a tool intended to help pure clinical researchers incorporate AI into their research programmes.
- sungam 1y ago
  Thanks, I am not currently doing research in this area - my lab-based research is mainly focused on the role of fibroblasts in skin cancer development
childintime 1y ago
would a tool that can take a truly tiny sample out of the lesion be a valuable complement? so we can send it in (with the tool) and get a lab test done?
- sungam 1y ago
  Unfortunately not that useful - we could do that now by taking a very small (e.g. 2mm) punch biopsy, and if it shows melanoma obviously that is helpful and the rest of the lesion needs to be removed. The issue is that a negative result doesn't exclude melanoma elsewhere in the lesion. I have been working with a startup to try and develop a non-invasive molecular test for melanoma so hopefully this will be possible in the future.
andreasgl 1y ago
I like the project! Congrats on the launch. As I understand it, size is one of the key indicators of melanoma. But in some of these images, it’s difficult to tell whether the mole is 1 mm or 10 mm. I assume your image set doesn’t include size information. If you can find sources with rulers or some kind of scale, that would be very helpful.
- sungam 1y ago
  I will have a look at this and include the size if it is possible
  - danlamanna 1y ago
    Many of the images do include a size, see https://api.isic-archive.com/images/?query=clin_size_long_diam_mm%3A* https://api.isic-archive.com/images/?query=clin_size_long_di.... FWIW @sungam - I'm one of the maintainers of the ISIC Archive, so feel free to let me know if finding/downloading data could be made easier. It's always interesting to see people using our data in the wild :)
    - sungam 1y ago
      Thanks for this - and thanks for maintaining this incredibly useful resource. What would be the best way to contact you?
      - danlamanna 1y ago
        firstname.lastname at kitware dot com.
pama 1y ago
Thanks for the reminder to schedule the annual dermatology appointment.
hopelite 1y ago
Today I learned most things are cancer
nextworddev 1y ago
Can people sue you for malpractice if something goes wrong?
- sungam 1y ago
  No - the app is just asking users to give their own opinion on publicly available images so there is no duty of care
omer9 1y ago
Every image with a pen marking is dangerous/cancer. Check.
- sungam 1y ago
  Haha not all of them - but actually this is an important observation because when training convnets for skin cancer diagnosis the presence of the pen marking can be an important confounding factor that needs to be accounted for
yoyopa 1y ago
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lazarus01 1y ago
What you created is a version of “am I hot or not” for skin cancer. The idea is constrained to the limitations of your programming capability. Showing a photo and creating 3 buttons with a static response is not very helpful. These are the limits of vibe coding. I was thinking to train a convnet to accurately classify pictures of moles as normal vs abnormal. The user can take a photo and upload it to a diagnostic website and get a diagnosis. It doesn’t seem like an overly complex model to develop and there is plenty of data referring to photos that show normal vs abnormal moles. I wonder why a product hasn’t been developed, where we are using image detection on our phones to actively screen for skin cancer. Seems like a no brainer. My thinking is there are not enough deaths to motivate the work. Dying from melanoma is nasty.
- rogerrogerr 1y ago
  We need liability reform - any app in the US would either tell you ~everything is skin cancer, or it would show one false negative and get sued into oblivion.
- nlawalker 1y ago
  I disagree, I found this very helpful. In a very short amount of time I was granted the insight, in a very clear way, that I am not very good at determining whether moles need treatment based on how they look.
- hedgehog 1y ago
  Developing a model like that, and evaluating it with practicing doctors, is a good learning project.
- g-mork 1y ago
  You're talking down to a technically unskilled dermatologist for successfully producing a useful app without the help of an engineer? Curious behaviour! This is far from the first story like this, in combination they're a potent bellwether for the future of our little corner of the universe, engaging in denials really doesn't help anyone
  - 1y ago
bix6 1y ago
The two links in your menu don’t work but otherwise this is awesome!
- sungam 1y ago
  Thanks - I wasn't expecting anyone to use the app apart from perhaps a few patients and definitely didn't expect #2 spot on HN Will add asap but currently focused on answering questions! Fortunately my £5 Digital Ocean server is coping fine so far...
lvl155 1y ago
Dude, everything is “I am concerned.”
- sungam 1y ago
  The representation is skewed towards skin cancers at this time due to the image dataset I have used. In a future version I will make it 50:50
  - lvl155 1y ago
    It would be cool if you can add wider angle vs close up. It’s really easy to miss spots in your back for example.
    - sungam 1y ago
      Thanks for the suggestion I will do this if I can source the images
      - lvl155 1y ago
        You can probably synthesize using AI.
orliesaurus 1y ago
What did you use to build this? Where did you deploy?
- sungam 1y ago
  Coded using Gemini Pro 2.5 (free version) in about 2-3 hours. Single file including all html/js/css, Vanilla JS, no backend, scores persisted with localStorage. Deployed using ubuntu/apache2/python/flask on a £5 Digital Ocean server (but could have been hosted on a static hosting provider as it's just a single page with no backend). Images / metadata stored in an AWS S3 bucket.
dhruvbird 1y ago
This is awesome! After about 50 attempts, I have a much better sense of what to look out for when I see something. I wish there were more such focused apps. for specific specific health related things.
- sungam 1y ago
  Thanks, I am pleased you found it useful. This is exactly how a dermatologist learns to recognise skin cancer - by making decisions and then getting feedback. I think anyone can improve dramatically with an hour or so of practice and then this skill is useful lifelong.
  - dhruvbird 1y ago
    I wonder if most people get the same things wrong. I checked your other comments and noticed that there is no server side component. In case you add one, I would be really interested in knowing which ones are most confused, and in which direction.
    - sungam 1y ago
      Yes I could add this quite easily - will do in the next version
bobmcnamara 1y ago
I'm around 75% Idea: distribution of player scores I'm going to get some models checked out.
- sungam 1y ago
  Great idea! Will aim to add to the next version
SilentM68 1y ago
Interesting. I wish there existed an app for actually finding a cure for every killer decease.
- sungam 1y ago
  Haha I think will need more than just an app! But in all seriousness, the potential for applying modern AI techniques to DNA and protein sequence analysis, structural analysis and regulatory network modeling is immense and we have only scratched the surface so I am sure it will accelerate biological discovery.
cjbgkagh 1y ago
This is great, I had no idea how off base I was with my assumptions. It’ll be interesting to keep the usage data to find out what kinds of images people have the most trouble with. As in what kind of mole is the most likely to be missed. Though perhaps dermatologist already know that answer well enough. I would love to see more of such classifiers for other medical conditions, googling for images tends not to produce a representative sample.
- sungam 1y ago
  Thanks, I'm really pleased that people have found it useful! Wasn't expecting much from the app just coded it in an evening as it's something I've been thinking about for years
MistaGobo 1y ago
WARNING: Not to be viewed while eating!
- sungam 1y ago
  Perhaps should add a NSFE tag...
asdev 1y ago
is this legal?
- sungam 1y ago
  Why wouldn't it be? The images are publicly available and have creative commons license.
FpUser 1y ago
I like the thing but .. "Vibe coded" - asked ChatGPT or whatever alternative to do the thing for me. There is no fucking vibe here, just another cheesy term.
m-hodges 1y ago
Good example of shovelware that some say is absent.¹ ¹ https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
- sungam 1y ago
  Had not heard of that term before, but looking at the article I would agree!
meindnoch 1y ago
Is this really "invasive melanoma"? https://drmagnuslynch.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/isic-images/ISIC_0024270.jpg https://drmagnuslynch.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/isic-images...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jonahx 1y ago
  Yeah that seems likely to be a misclassification...
- sungam 1y ago
  According to the metadata supplied with the dataset yes Could definitely be a misclassification, however a small proportion of moles that look entirely harmless to the naked eye and under the dermatoscope (skin microscope) can be cancerous. For example, have a look at these images of naevoid melanoma: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=naevoid+melanoma https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=naevoid+melanoma This is why dermatology can be challenging and why AI-based image classification is difficult from a liability/risk perspective I was previously clinical lead for a melanoma multidisciplinary meeting and 1-2 times per year I would see a patient with a melanoma that presented like this and looking back at previous photos there was no features that would have worried me. The key thing that I emphasise to patients is that even if a mole looks harmless it is important to monitor for any signs of change since a skin cancer will almost always change in appearance over a period of several months
  - jonahx 1y ago
    > however a small proportion of moles that look entirely harmless to the naked eye and under the dermatoscope (skin microscope) can be cancerous. That is very scary. So the only way to be sure is to have everything sent to the lab. But I'm guessing cost/benefit of that from a risk perspective make it prohibitive? So if you're an unlucky person with a completely benign-presenting melanoma, you're just shit out of luck? Or will the appearance change before it spreads internally?
jonahx 1y ago
Cool project, and helpful for learning. One concern: I don't believe the rates that you see "concerning" vs "not-concerning" in the app match the population rates. That is, a random "mole-like spot or thingy" on a random person will have have a much lower base rate of being cancerous than the app would suggest. Of course, this is necessary to make the learning efficient. But unless you pair it with base rate education it will create a bias for over-concern.
- sungam 1y ago
  Yes you are right - the representation is biased due to the image dataset that I have used. I don't think it would be useful to match the population distribution since the fraction of skin cancers would be tiny (less than 1:1000 of the images) so users would not learn what a skin cancer looks like, however in the next version I will make it closer to 50:50 and highlight the difference from the population distribution.
  - jonahx 1y ago
    Yes. As I said matching the population base rate wouldn't be practical, so you'd need to educate on that separately from the identification learning. Let's say I achieve a 95% on the app though. Most people would have a massively over-inflated sense of their correctness in the wild. If the actual fraction is only 1/1000 and I see a friend with a lesion I identify as concerning, then my actual success rate would be: 1*0.95 / (0.05*999 + 1*0.95) So ~1.8%, not 95%. Few people understand Bayesian updating.
    - sungam 1y ago
      Thanks for this - I need to look at this more carefully
owenversteeg 1y ago
(spoilers!) here's how to win: everything is cancer, except the common moles and the keratoses. OP, what are some of the other common options for a spot on the body aside from common moles, cancer, and keratoses? Solar lentigines, freckles, bug bites, eczema? I'm also curious what the actual chance of cancer is given a random mole anywhere on the body, obviously a more involved question.
- sungam 1y ago
  Good observations! But hopefully you learned something in coming to those conclusion... The chance of a random skin lesion being skin cancer is extremely low. Apart from the appearance key things to look for are a lesion that is not going away particularly if it is changing in appearance. Here are some other common skin lesions: - Dermatofibroma (harmless skin growth) - Actinic keratosis (sun damage) - Milium - Comedome - Acne pustule / nodule - Viral wart - Molluscum contagiousum (harmless viral growth) - Cherry angioma (harmless blood vessel growth) - Spider naevus (another type of blood vessel growth) There are more than 2000 diagnoses in dermatology so not an exhaustive list!
saulpw 1y ago
The hamburger menu "About" and "How To Recognize Skin Cancer" both go to a 404 page that's a copy of a company website called "Revessa Health". Is this your company?
- sungam 1y ago
  Thanks for highlighting - I wasn't expecting anyone to use the app so haven't added these yet but will do so asap The app is hosted on my Digital Ocean server that hosts a few other projects including my Revessa Health site
haspok 1y ago
A few years ago there used to be an ML-based app for Android that could classify photos of lesions that you took with your phone and could recommend you a visit to the dermatologist (or not). Unfortunately it seems to be removed now, the webpage is still live (somewhat): https://emdee.ai/ https://emdee.ai/ It was done by a small team in Hungary, with the support of MDs of course. (I would guess that the majority of the work was coordinating with MDs, getting them to teach the software... and collecting photos of lesions. Must have been fun!) They probably could not monatize it (or were not interested, or it was just too much work for a side hustle)... the sad reality of living in Eastern Europe. I do think that the idea is perfect, it is non-invasive, but could warn you of a potentially very dangerous condition in time. You don't have to wait for the doctor, or unnecessarily visit them. I would actually pay for this as a service.
- lelele 1y ago
  There is another one such app: https://www.skinvision.com/ https://www.skinvision.com/
- sungam 1y ago
  Making an app like this is (relatively) straightforward. The challenge is managing liability / risk / regulation. For individual doctors we accept that some errors will occur and there is a well defined insurance / liability framework. We do not yet have this for AI but I think it will come eventually.
- epolanski 1y ago
  It's Hungary, a country in the EU, I see no reason why would they not be able to monetize it if they wanted to. Bar a lack of a vibrant VC scene they have the very same monetization option one in SF would have. The most probable reason they did not was to avoid assuming legal responsibility for the results.
mustaphah 1y ago
cool, very nice. The real test starts when the first dependency gets deprecated.
- sungam 1y ago
  No dependencies - single page app with no backend including all html/css/js
yieldcrv 1y ago
It’s great that more people can express themselves For personal fulfillment, humanities evolutionary fitness, and for commercial purposes
retinaros 1y ago
Ok everything is cancer. Thanks for nothing now I wont sleep
- cindyllm 1y ago
  [dead]
jacquesm 1y ago
Nice job. Now you really need to study up on the statistics behind this and you'll quickly come to the conclusion that this was the easy part. What to do with the output is the hard part. I've seen a start-up that made their bread and butter on such classifications, they did an absolutely great job of it but found the the problem of deciding what to do with such an application without ending up with net negative patient outcomes to be far, far harder than the classification problem itself. The error rates, no matter how low, are going to be your main challenge, both false positives and false negatives can be extremely expensive, both in terms of finance and in terms of emotion.
- sungam 1y ago
  Thanks for your comment - the purpose of this app is patient education rather than diagnosis but I will definitely have a look at the relevant stats in more detail!
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    The risk I think is that people will not understand that that is your goal, instead they will use it to help them diagnose something they might think is suspicious. They will go through your images until they get a good score, believe themselves and expert and proceed to diagnose themselves (and their friends). By the time you have an image set that is representative and that will actually educate people to the point where they know what to do and what not to do you've created a whole raft of amateur dermatologists. And the result of that will be that a lot of people are going to knock on the doors of real dermatologists who might tell them not to worry about something when they are now primed to argue with them. I've seen this pattern before with self diagnosis.
    - nextaccountic 1y ago
      So what? Are you arguing that ensuring patients have less information available about diseases leads to better outcomes? What's your take on public campaigns about self diagnosing mammary cancer by touch? (very common where I live) As a patient I'd rather have more information available to me, even if I ultimately defer to specialists Also it's common for medical professionals to ignore symptoms of certain demographics - in those cases, enabling patients to advocate for themselves is essential https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/well/mind/medical-gaslighting.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/well/mind/medical-gasligh... A personal anecdote of mine was a friend that had abdominal pain for months. She had some comorbidities that made it easier for doctors to dismiss her symptoms. After visits to various doctors she only got adequate treatment because I went with her and advocated for her. After discarding multiple options eventually a renal infection was diagnosed and treated. If she went with the opinion of the first doctor she would still have the underlying condition untreated.
geoffbp 1y ago
“How to recognise skin cancer” link from the menu goes to 404
- sungam 1y ago
  Sorry - wasn't expecting anyone to use the app or any traction on HN! Will update
kittikitti 1y ago
This is actually a really great vibe coded app. It's simple and doesn't require much logic. Will vibe coding catch on to more sophisticated and complex use cases? That's only if the whispers about an upcoming AI Winter are false.
- sungam 1y ago
  Thanks - I'm glad you found it useful! I have been meaning to make it for many years but could never justify the time involved until AI made it possible.
incone123 1y ago
The link to "how to recognise..." is broken. Nice app. But wouldn't a doctor normally get a history as well? Anyway, I'm not a doctor which is probably why I got most of the answers wrong :)
- sungam 1y ago
  Yes a doctor would get a history which will help, however I get a high score on these images and another skin cancer doctor that commented also got a high score so in most cases the diagnosis can be made accurately on the image alone.
krunger 1y ago
No reason why it couldn't have been done in reverse, have a programmer code it while using AI to understand skin cancer.
- ajkjk 1y ago
  Well.. there is somewhat more on the line if it's wrong that way.
- sungam 1y ago
  There are lots of apps that do this. It's (relatively) easy to get AI to perform at the same level of a dermatologist but liability/risk management/regulation is much harder to solve
roggenbuck 1y ago
This is great!
johannes_ne 1y ago
I made a quite similar app 7 years ago. https://melanoma.jenevoldsen.com/ https://melanoma.jenevoldsen.com/ May have been in the training data.
- sungam 1y ago
  That's great! I used the publicly available images from the ISIC challenge dataset which are CC licensed.
  - johannes_ne 1y ago
    Sorry, my point was not that you had taken the idea or the images (I also used ISIC). I just considered that the language model (Gemini) may have been especially effective at coding this specific app idea, sine my old app (which is on GitHub) was probably in the data it was trained on.
globalise83 1y ago
As someone with literally every single possible variation of skin blemish, mole and God knows what else, this scares the living hell out of me.
- mewpmewp2 1y ago
  Yeah, I only have just 1 concerning, but still made me spend 20 minutes googling difference between dermatofibroma and basal cell cancer. I think it is dermatofibroma, but I guess good point anyway to let it get checked out.
- abootstrapper 1y ago
  Get a yearly full body skin check from a dermatologist. It’s a common thing. I’ve been doing it for years because of my skin type. They caught early Basal cell carcinoma the last time I went.
123sereusername 1y ago
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Kibranoz 1y ago
doing this in real dev could have taken similar time.
- sungam 1y ago
  For an experienced front end dev yes - for the average dermatologist no chance!
ada1981 1y ago
How good is ChatGPT or Claude at classifying these? Have you tried?
- sungam 1y ago
  Not tried but my guess is ChatGPT will be quite accurate but get a small proportion wrong. The challenge with skin cancer is that we cannot afford to miss even 1:10,000 cases
  - ada1981 1y ago
    Are doctors that accurate?
derbOac 1y ago
Cool but it seems like it would get more difficult with more non-cancerous but medically concerning lesions (eg due to infectious disease).
- sungam 1y ago
  This is true - there are more than 2000 different conditions in dermatology but the most important ones to recognise are skin cancers
  - derbOac 1y ago
    My concern (?) is the task is unrealistically easy without more varieties of lesions to distinguish from cancer.
thimkerbell 1y ago
Why would a dermatologist want to just remove but not biopsy a suspected facial skin cancer?
- sungam 1y ago
  There would be no reason to do this - skin lesions removed are almost always sent for pathological analysis even if expected to be harmless
JeremyJaydan 1y ago
I absolutely love the reality check on doctors coding and skin cancer, great work!
reilly3000 1y ago
There may be an interesting opportunity to gather data on the accuracy of guesses per image. You could use something like Google analytics, but simple server-side logging is more private and keeps the page light. The question could be: What images are most often mistaken? What characteristics do they share? Knowing the highest false negative images would be really valuable people to know what not to ignore.
Uptrenda 1y ago
Biggest irony of the thread is the OP and the ones commenting celebrating the tech putting themselves out of the job while contributing it. Eg. a dermatologist who looks at skin conditions -- a very visual skill. They use their skills at that to build an app that people can use to check for skin cancer, rashes, whatever. Now, people have less incentive to see a dermatologist and might miss the zebras (and in fact: people are lazy and tend to hate doctors already so they won't.) Then there's the software engineers here who (even if you're a high level senior engineer) are further moved down the chopping board the better AI gets. YAY, three cheers for all the soy boys building AI. See you on unemployment soon.
noisy_boy 1y ago
This just highlights that domain experts became even more valuable with LLMs. Not only they know the domain, now they realise their ideas too with minor effort. Doesn't bode well for programmers in non-tech areas.
- sungam 1y ago
  This is true, however I am sure that AI-based image analysis will also replace some of the work of dermatologists eventually so nobody is safe...
softwaredoug 1y ago
Vibe coding is like spreadsheets. We take spreadsheet for granted. VisiCalc back in the day unlocked computing for an average person in the same way AI does today. Back then to tabulate some stats you’d need a team of programmers. When spreadsheets became available, anyone could figure out how to essentially program a computer without software background. It would be interesting to see how spreadsheets failed/succeeded to learn the limits of vibe coding. For example it’s a common meme that you find teams using spreadsheets as databases. Perhaps they are so successful that they end up being misused. Would the same happen with AI coding?
- sungam 1y ago
  I think we are going to see more and more people in diverse fields developing applications that meet the requirements of a small niche that may not have been economically viable previously.
zoeey 1y ago
This project really resonates with me. I have a few friends in healthcare who had great ideas for patient tools, but without a technical partner and no budget for a development team, nothing ever came of them. Seeing someone actually build something like this, even if it's not perfect, gives me a sense of hope. When you combine domain expertise with some AI tools, you don’t have to wait around for someone else. You can just start.
akeck 1y ago
How do you tell the difference between benign Seborrheic Keratosis and melanoma? Some of them are very similar!
smnplk 1y ago
I was vibe coding server configurations all day.
8mobile 1y ago
You've really had a great idea, and maybe you can save lives with this. Do you process the images yourself? Do you pass them to some AI? How does it work for privacy? Do you delete them afterwards? Thanks and congratulations.
elzbardico 1y ago
This looks a lot like the early years of the PC, and I love it. Well, you still need to pay for infrastructure, so it is not exactly the same, but I believe that we will see a lot of creative stuff enabled by the fact that LLMs remove a lot of the barriers to entry before the creative layman and coding. I don't fucking care if we all lose our jobs, as long as we also fuck the VCs by making them obsolete.
fragmede 1y ago
how do I submit pics? https://share.icloud.com/photos/048Y_ALNTMwlP3QqZNwja5HEQ https://share.icloud.com/photos/048Y_ALNTMwlP3QqZNwja5HEQ
rasengan0 1y ago
that was fun: Score: 6 / 7 (86%)
deleted 1y ago
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rkunal 1y ago
Would you like to hire "Cyber security engineer for vibe-coded applications" ?
- sungam 1y ago
  Not at the present time. I think if the project takes off I will move it to static hosting anyway to reduce the attack surface.
ks2048 1y ago
The "About" link leads to "Oops! The page you were looking for doesn't exist.".
thr0waway001 1y ago
This was always the dream for people with real ideas for an app but lacked the knowhow to build it. Namely: “I have an idea for an app but I don’t know how to do it and I don’t want to spend all my time and resources on the app either. The app is a means to an end, not the end itself.” We are now living in a time where getting to the end is much more possible.
caazzi 1y ago
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edimoldovan 1y ago
Pretty nice work. One of the problems I encountered in my career was to understand the actual need. You have that entirely. AI coming in and giving you the ability to do what you and others need and most devs couldn't do without you explainin the need and requirement in detail, is pretty amazing. Maybe you teach this to some non-dev peers of yours?

429 points by sungam 1y ago

AbstractH24 1y ago

I just opened this up to see if HN was supportive or hyper-critical of vibe coding in medicine. Since this isn't invasive I'm glad to see its the supportive option.

nasir 1y ago

Learned quite a bit and seems like a basic but necessary thing to know about!

sungam 1y ago
Thanks, I'm glad you found it useful. My patients were constantly asking for a way to learn what skin cancer looked like beyond the ABCDE rule and I wanted to try and introduce a gamification aspect to it.

deleted 1y ago

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aegypti 1y ago

Basal Cell Carcinoma is very gross! Think a set number of questions to start with would be good. Not sure if there’s an end point, I drifted off after ~20 or so

sungam 1y ago
Good idea will implement this is a future version

k2xl 1y ago

Wow this game just proves to me how difficult your job is. I am basically getting 50%. One or two seemed quite obvious to me as concerning or not but turned out to be the other way

sungam 1y ago
It can be challenging but the large majority of skin cancers are fairly obvious and the main reason people don't spot them is because they are not checking their skin regularly and don't have any idea what to look for. Hopefully this app will help patients to learn the basic things to look for.

leetrout 1y ago

Why do the images get a weird offset slice effect on safari on mobile after submitting a guess with the buttons?

sungam 1y ago
No idea, I will look into this

agnishom 1y ago

This is a good use of vibecoding. The main "algorithm" to be implemented is very straightforward , and for the hard stuff, we have an expert.

sungam 1y ago
Yes I think so - it's a very simple application but I would never have had the time to do it myself. If anyone is interested: Coded using Gemini Pro 2.5 (free version) in about 2-3 hours. Single file including all html/js/css, Vanilla JS, no backend, scores persisted with localStorage.

curtisszmania 1y ago

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jampekka 1y ago

To my eye most of the basal cell carsinomas looked like everyday rashes, pimples or scratches. My correct rate was under chance. This could be hypochondria inducing for many?

sungam 1y ago
Basal cell carcinomas can look very similar to other harmless skin lesions. The key thing is that they will not resolve with time and will slowly grow whereas a rash, pimple or scratch will resolve over a few months. Fortunately basal cell carciomas are very slow growing and do not spread elsewhere in the body or cause other health issues and a delay of a few months in diagnosis does not have a big impact on outcome.

jjallen 1y ago

Very cool. I learned a lot as a non dermatologist but someone with a sister who has had melanoma at a very young age. I went from 50% to 85% very quickly. And that’s because most of them are skin cancer and that was easy to learn. So my only advice would be to make closer to 50% actually skin cancer. Although maybe you want to focus on the bad ones and get people to learn those more. This was way harder than I thought this detection would be. Makes me want to go to a dermatologist.

sungam 1y ago
Thanks, this is a good point - I think a 50:50 balance of cancer versus harmless lesions would be better and will change this in a future version. Of course in reality the vast majority of skin lesions and moles are harmless and the challenge is identifying those that are not and I think that even a short period of focused training like this can help the average person to identify a concerning lesion.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
loeg 1y ago
I found the first dozen to be mostly cancer and then the next dozen were mostly non-cancer. (Not sure if it's randomized.) (Also, I'm really bad at identifying cancerous vs non-cancerous skin lesions.)
- sungam 1y ago
  It is randomized so probably just bad luck! FWIW I get a high score and another skin cancer doctor who commented also gets a high score so it is possible to make the diagnosis in most cases on the basis of these images.
alanfranz 1y ago
> So my only advice would be to make closer to 50% actually skin cancer. If I were to code this for "real training" of a dermatologist, I'd make this closer to "real world" training rate. As a dermatologist, I'll imagine that probably just 1 out of 100 (or something like that) skin lesions that people could imagine are cancerous, actually are so. With the current dataset, there're just too many cancerous images. This makes it kind of easy to just flag something as "cancerous" and still retain a good "score" - but the point is moot, if as a dermatologist you send _too many_ people without cancer to do further exams, then you're negating the usefulness of what you're doing.

NoiseBert69 1y ago

What happens if I make a picture of my cat with it?

sungam 1y ago
Not sure how you would do this but feel free to try!

y-curious 1y ago

Half of these basal cell carcinomas look like picked pimples. Are there any sort of protocols for self screening for carcinomas a la self-testing ones testicles? I've never heard of anything other than the ABCDE for moles

lukko 1y ago
Classically, BCC's have a pearly surface and 'rolled' edges, which differentiates them from pimples.
sungam 1y ago
Look for any new skin lesion that is not resolving with time especially if persisting for a number of months. You can take photos of different body sites and repeat every couple of months and then put the two photos side by side on a computer screen to look for any difference. If unsure about the lesions that are present then worth getting a full skin check with a dermatologist as a baseline so that you then just need to look for new/changing lesions. Photos of basal cell carcinoma (no affiliation): https://dermnetnz.org/topics/basal-cell-carcinoma https://dermnetnz.org/topics/basal-cell-carcinoma

toledocavani 1y ago

Is there any reputable (reviewed, endorsed) AI model to detect skin cancer? I have a lot of similar moles, and playing with this app make me concern about all of them.

scotty79 1y ago
I heard that the good rule of thumb is to be concerned about unique ones. It much less probable that you develop exactly same looking cancer in two unrelated spots.
- sungam 1y ago
  Yes we call this the "Ugly Duckling" sign
sungam 1y ago
Lots of models out there but I would not trust any for diagnosis without review of a dermatologist yet. The challenge is unanticipated edge cases and managing risk/liability/regulation. I have no doubt that if a major AI company focused on this problem then these issues could be overcome with current technology but perhaps the market is not big enough to justify the investment required.

lukko 1y ago

I'm a doctor too and would love to hear more about the rationale and process for creating this. It's quite interesting to have a binary distinction: 'concerned vs not concerned', which I guess would be more relevant for referring clinicians, rather than getting an actual diagnosis. Whereas naming multiple choice 'BCC vs melanoma' would be more of a learning tool useful for medical students.. Echoing the other comments, but it would be interesting to match the cards to the actual incidence in the population or in primary care - although it may be a lot more boring with the amount of harmless naevi!

sungam 1y ago
Thanks for your comment. The main motivation for me in developing the app was that lots of my patients wanted me to guide them to a resource that can help them improve their ability to recognise skin cancer and, in my view, a good way to learn is to be forced to make a decision an then receive feedback on that decision. For the patient I think the decision actually is binary - either (i) I contact a doctor about this skin lesion now or (ii) I wait for a bit to see what happens or do nothing. In reality most skin cancers are very obvious even to a non-expert and the reason they are missed are that patients are not checking their skin or have no idea what to look for. I think you are right about the incidence - would be better to be a more balanced distribution of benign versus malignant, but I don't think it would be good to just show 99% harmless moles and 1% cancers (which is probably the accurate representation of skin lesions in primary care) since it would take too long for patients to learn the appearance of skin cancer.
- jazoom 1y ago
  > most skin cancers are very obvious even to a non-expert and the reason they are missed are that patients are not checking their skin or have no idea what to look for I am a skin cancer doctor in Queensland and all I do is find and remove skin cancers (find between 10 and 30 every day). In my experience the vast majority of cancers I find are not obvious to other doctors (not even seen by them), let alone obvious to the patient. Most of what I find are BCCs, which are usually very subtle when they are small. Even when I point them out to the patient they still can't see them. Also, almost all melanomas I find were not noticed by the patient and they're usually a little surprised about the one I point to. In my experience the only skin cancers routinely noticed by patients are SCCs and Merkel cell carcinomas. With respect, if "most skin cancers are very obvious even to a non-expert" I suggest the experts are missing them and letting them get larger than necessary. I realise things will be different in other parts of the world and my location allows a lot more practice than most doctors would get. Update: I like the quiz. Nice work! In case anyone is wondering, I only got 27/30. Distinguishing between naevus and melanoma without a dermatoscope on it is sometimes impossible. Get your skin checked.

DrewADesign 1y ago

This is awesome. Great use of AI to realize an idea. Subject matter experts making educational tools is one of the most hopeful things to come out of AI. It’s just a bummer that it’s far more frequently used to pump wealth to tech investors from the entire class of people that have been creating things on the internet for the past couple of decades, and that projects like this fuel the “why do you oppose fighting cancer” sort of counter arguments against that.

sungam 1y ago
Thanks for your comment - I'm pleased that people have found it useful and definitely only possible because of AI coding. I agree that this is likely to be applicable to non-experts in many different areas.
- DrewADesign 1y ago
  Absolutely. I hope you’ll encourage your colleagues to follow suit!
jacquesm 1y ago
On the contrary. There is a whole raft of start-ups around this idea and other related ones. And almost all of them have found the technical challenges manageable, and the medical and ethical challenges formidable.
- DrewADesign 1y ago
  I’m not exactly sure what in my comment you’re responding to, here: My appreciation that a subject matter expert is now capable of creating a tool to share their knowledge, that tech investors are using AI to siphon money from people that actually make things, or that good projects like this are used to justify that siphoning?
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    You wrote: "This is awesome. Great use of AI to realize an idea. Subject matter experts making educational tools is one of the most hopeful things to come out of AI. It’s just a bummer that it’s far more frequently used to pump wealth to tech investors from the entire class of people that have been creating things on the internet for the past couple of decades, and that projects like this fuel the “why do you oppose fighting cancer” sort of counter arguments against that." Let's take that bit by bit then if you find it hard to correlate. > This is awesome. Agreed, it is a very neat demonstration of what you can do with domain knowledge married to powerful technology. > Great use of AI to realize an idea. This idea, while a good one, is not at all novel and does not require vibe coding or LLMs in any way, but it does rely on a lot of progress in image classification in the last decade or so if you want to take it to the next level. Just training people on a limited set of images is not going to do much of anything other than to inject noise into the system. > Subject matter experts making educational tools is one of the most hopeful things to come out of AI. Well.. yes and no. It is a hopeful thing but it doesn't really help when releasing it bypasses the whole review system that we have in place for classifying medical devices. And make no mistake: this is a medical diagnostic device and it will be used by people as such even if it wasn't intended as such. There is a fair chance that the program - vibe coded, remember? - has not been reviewed and tested to the degree that a medical device normally would be and that there has been no extensive testing in the field to determine what the effect on patient outcomes of such an education program is. This is a difficult and tricky topic which ultimately boils down to a long - and possibly expensive - path on the road to being able to release such a thing responsibly. > It’s just a bummer that it’s far more frequently used to pump wealth to tech investors from the entire class of people that have been creating things on the internet for the past couple of decades As I wrote, I'm familiar with quite a few startups in this domain. Education and image classification + medical domain knowledge is - and was - investable and has been for a long time. But it is not a simple proposition. > and that projects like this fuel the “why do you oppose fighting cancer” sort of counter arguments against that. Hardly anybody that I'm aware of - besides the Trump administration - currently opposes fighting cancer, there are veritable armies of scientists in academia and outside of it doing just that. This particular kind of cancer is low hanging fruit because (1) it is externally visible and (2) there is a fair amount of training data available already. But even with those advantages the hard problems, statistics, and ultimately the net balance in patient outcomes if you start using the tool at scale are where the harsh reality sets in: solving this problem for the 80% of easy to classify cases is easy by definition. The remaining 20% are hard, even for experts, more so for a piece of software or a person trained by a piece of software. Even a percentage point or two shift in the confusion matrix can turn a potentially useful tool into a useless one or vice versa. That's the problem that people are trying to solve, not the image classification basics and/or patient education, no matter how useful these are when used in conjunction with proper medical processes. But props to the author for building it and releasing it, I'm pretty curious about what the long term effect of this is, I will definitely be following the effort. Better like that?

quantummagic 1y ago

Nice Job. This really highlights that people who obsess in telling us that "AI hallucinates", and "AI isn't intelligent", are missing the point. At the end of the day, it's simply useful, and incredibly empowering.

sungam 1y ago
Yes, without AI this app definitely would not exist as I would not have had time to make it. I think that this will apply to multiple other areas within the economy.
- sky2224 1y ago
  Another thing to add: developers don't have the time or don't want to spend time on apps like this, but it's not like this is anything complicated. This app ultimately amounts to something that has been done millions of times, and so I think it's actually quite empowering for individuals to be able to quickly build mockups of apps like this for themselves without needing to spend upwards of $75/hr to hire some freelance dev to do it for them.

jmull 1y ago

I kind of love the diy aspect of ai coding. A dermatologist a short while ago with this idea would have to find a willing and able partner to do a bunch of work -- meaning that most likely it would just remain an idea. This isn't just for non-tech people either -- I have a decades long list of ideas I'd like to work on but simply do not have time for. So now I'm cranking up the ol' AI agents an seeing what I can do about it.

asadotzler 1y ago
[flagged]
- bitmasher9 1y ago
  This is not a healthcare app, it’s a health education app. This app will never have PII, or be used for treatment/diagnosis. If it goes down tomorrow it will have zero impact on anyone’s healthcare.
- tptacek 1y ago
  It's not OK to talk this way about people's Show HN projects; this is in the guidelines.
jmkni 1y ago
Same, I've had ideas rattling around in my brain for years which I've just never executed on, because I'm 'pretty sure' they won't work and it's not been worth the effort I've been coding professionally for ~20 years now, so it's not that I don't know what to do, it's just a time sink Now I'm blasting through them with AI and getting them out there just in case They're a bit crap, but better than not existing at all, you never know
- ecocentrik 1y ago
  I'm a big fan of barriers to entry and using effort as a filter for good work. This derma app could be so much better if it actually taught laypeople to identify the difference between carcinomas, melanomas and non-cancerous moles instead of just being a fixed loop quiz.

ziptron 1y ago

Thank you for making this. My dad passed away from squamous cell carcinoma in 2010. In retrospect, through my casual research into the space and tools like this one, it occurs to me that the entire event was likely preventable and occurred merely because we did not react quickly enough to the cancer’s presence.

sungam 1y ago
Thanks for your comment - my practice is focused on skin cancer and I see so many patients that bring a photo from many months earlier that shows an obvious skin cancer that could have been treated more easily at an earlier stage. Patient education should enable these to be picked up sooner.

rcruzeiro 1y ago

I’ve learned that basal cell carcinoma can look scarily unremarkable! Would be useful to add some explanation on the defining features that would give it away to a dermatologist.

sungam 1y ago
Yes I need to add this along with a tutorial on skin cancer diagnosis. Honestly wasn't expecting anyone to use the app so just did the basics!

minton 1y ago

The zoomed in view is great if you’re commonly examining under magnification, but perhaps a slightly less zoomed view (or ability to switch between each) might make this more practical for common folks.

sungam 1y ago
Thanks, I will try to source alternative images for the next version

vindex10 1y ago

Hi! That's really useful tool! I wish it also explained the decision making process, how to understand from the picture what is the right answer. I'm really getting lost between melanoma and seborrheic keratosis / nevus. I went through ~120 pictures, but couldn't learn to distinguish those. Also, the guide in the burger menu leads to a page that doesn't exist: https://molecheck.info/how-to-recognise-skin-cancer https://molecheck.info/how-to-recognise-skin-cancer

sungam 1y ago
This is very helpful feedback. I will add some more information to help with the diagnosis and add an article in the burger menu with detailed explanation. Being honest I didn't expect anyone apart from a few of may patients to use the app and certainly did not expect front page HN!
- jgilias 1y ago
  Hey! Thanks for making this! A bit more polish and this is something I’d make sure everyone in my family has played with. Imagine a world where every third person is able to recognise worrying skin lesions early on.
jgilias 1y ago
Also came to the same conclusion. I want a mode where 50% of the set are melanomas, and the other 50% are “brown benign things”.
- sungam 1y ago
  Will add this in next version!
addandsubtract 1y ago
I'm not a doctor, but there's an ABCDE[0] rule of thumb to spot signs of skin cancer: Asymmetry: One half of the spot is unlike the other half. Border: The spot has an irregular, scalloped, or poorly defined border. Color: The spot has varying colors from one area to the next Diameter: melanomas are usually greater than 6 millimeters, or about the size of a pencil eraser Evolving: Changing in size, shape, color, or new symptoms (itching, bleeding) [0] https://www.aad.org/public/diseases/skin-cancer/find/at-risk/abcdes https://www.aad.org/public/diseases/skin-cancer/find/at-risk...

redox99 1y ago

Are there an equal amount of cancer and non cancer images? In my case the vast majority (I'd say around 75%) are cancerous.

sungam 1y ago
You are right - the distribution is not equal largely because the dataset that I used had less pictures of harmless moles but I will aim to make it 50:50 in the next version

stefantalpalaru 1y ago

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rfrey 1y ago

Perfect use of AI assisted coding - a domain expert creating a focused, relatively straightforward (from a programming perspective) app. @sungam, if your research agenda includes creating AI models for skin cancer, feel free to reach out (email in profile), I make a tool intended to help pure clinical researchers incorporate AI into their research programmes.

sungam 1y ago
Thanks, I am not currently doing research in this area - my lab-based research is mainly focused on the role of fibroblasts in skin cancer development

childintime 1y ago

would a tool that can take a truly tiny sample out of the lesion be a valuable complement? so we can send it in (with the tool) and get a lab test done?

sungam 1y ago
Unfortunately not that useful - we could do that now by taking a very small (e.g. 2mm) punch biopsy, and if it shows melanoma obviously that is helpful and the rest of the lesion needs to be removed. The issue is that a negative result doesn't exclude melanoma elsewhere in the lesion. I have been working with a startup to try and develop a non-invasive molecular test for melanoma so hopefully this will be possible in the future.

andreasgl 1y ago

I like the project! Congrats on the launch. As I understand it, size is one of the key indicators of melanoma. But in some of these images, it’s difficult to tell whether the mole is 1 mm or 10 mm. I assume your image set doesn’t include size information. If you can find sources with rulers or some kind of scale, that would be very helpful.

sungam 1y ago
I will have a look at this and include the size if it is possible
- danlamanna 1y ago
  Many of the images do include a size, see https://api.isic-archive.com/images/?query=clin_size_long_diam_mm%3A* https://api.isic-archive.com/images/?query=clin_size_long_di.... FWIW @sungam - I'm one of the maintainers of the ISIC Archive, so feel free to let me know if finding/downloading data could be made easier. It's always interesting to see people using our data in the wild :)
  - sungam 1y ago
    Thanks for this - and thanks for maintaining this incredibly useful resource. What would be the best way to contact you?
    - danlamanna 1y ago
      firstname.lastname at kitware dot com.

pama 1y ago

Thanks for the reminder to schedule the annual dermatology appointment.

hopelite 1y ago

Today I learned most things are cancer

nextworddev 1y ago

Can people sue you for malpractice if something goes wrong?

sungam 1y ago
No - the app is just asking users to give their own opinion on publicly available images so there is no duty of care

omer9 1y ago

Every image with a pen marking is dangerous/cancer. Check.

sungam 1y ago
Haha not all of them - but actually this is an important observation because when training convnets for skin cancer diagnosis the presence of the pen marking can be an important confounding factor that needs to be accounted for

yoyopa 1y ago

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lazarus01 1y ago

What you created is a version of “am I hot or not” for skin cancer. The idea is constrained to the limitations of your programming capability. Showing a photo and creating 3 buttons with a static response is not very helpful. These are the limits of vibe coding. I was thinking to train a convnet to accurately classify pictures of moles as normal vs abnormal. The user can take a photo and upload it to a diagnostic website and get a diagnosis. It doesn’t seem like an overly complex model to develop and there is plenty of data referring to photos that show normal vs abnormal moles. I wonder why a product hasn’t been developed, where we are using image detection on our phones to actively screen for skin cancer. Seems like a no brainer. My thinking is there are not enough deaths to motivate the work. Dying from melanoma is nasty.

rogerrogerr 1y ago
We need liability reform - any app in the US would either tell you ~everything is skin cancer, or it would show one false negative and get sued into oblivion.
nlawalker 1y ago
I disagree, I found this very helpful. In a very short amount of time I was granted the insight, in a very clear way, that I am not very good at determining whether moles need treatment based on how they look.
hedgehog 1y ago
Developing a model like that, and evaluating it with practicing doctors, is a good learning project.
g-mork 1y ago
You're talking down to a technically unskilled dermatologist for successfully producing a useful app without the help of an engineer? Curious behaviour! This is far from the first story like this, in combination they're a potent bellwether for the future of our little corner of the universe, engaging in denials really doesn't help anyone
- 1y ago

bix6 1y ago

The two links in your menu don’t work but otherwise this is awesome!

sungam 1y ago
Thanks - I wasn't expecting anyone to use the app apart from perhaps a few patients and definitely didn't expect #2 spot on HN Will add asap but currently focused on answering questions! Fortunately my £5 Digital Ocean server is coping fine so far...

lvl155 1y ago

Dude, everything is “I am concerned.”

sungam 1y ago
The representation is skewed towards skin cancers at this time due to the image dataset I have used. In a future version I will make it 50:50
- lvl155 1y ago
  It would be cool if you can add wider angle vs close up. It’s really easy to miss spots in your back for example.
  - sungam 1y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion I will do this if I can source the images
    - lvl155 1y ago
      You can probably synthesize using AI.

orliesaurus 1y ago

What did you use to build this? Where did you deploy?

sungam 1y ago
Coded using Gemini Pro 2.5 (free version) in about 2-3 hours. Single file including all html/js/css, Vanilla JS, no backend, scores persisted with localStorage. Deployed using ubuntu/apache2/python/flask on a £5 Digital Ocean server (but could have been hosted on a static hosting provider as it's just a single page with no backend). Images / metadata stored in an AWS S3 bucket.

dhruvbird 1y ago

This is awesome! After about 50 attempts, I have a much better sense of what to look out for when I see something. I wish there were more such focused apps. for specific specific health related things.

sungam 1y ago
Thanks, I am pleased you found it useful. This is exactly how a dermatologist learns to recognise skin cancer - by making decisions and then getting feedback. I think anyone can improve dramatically with an hour or so of practice and then this skill is useful lifelong.
- dhruvbird 1y ago
  I wonder if most people get the same things wrong. I checked your other comments and noticed that there is no server side component. In case you add one, I would be really interested in knowing which ones are most confused, and in which direction.
  - sungam 1y ago
    Yes I could add this quite easily - will do in the next version

bobmcnamara 1y ago

I'm around 75% Idea: distribution of player scores I'm going to get some models checked out.

sungam 1y ago
Great idea! Will aim to add to the next version

SilentM68 1y ago

Interesting. I wish there existed an app for actually finding a cure for every killer decease.

sungam 1y ago
Haha I think will need more than just an app! But in all seriousness, the potential for applying modern AI techniques to DNA and protein sequence analysis, structural analysis and regulatory network modeling is immense and we have only scratched the surface so I am sure it will accelerate biological discovery.

cjbgkagh 1y ago

This is great, I had no idea how off base I was with my assumptions. It’ll be interesting to keep the usage data to find out what kinds of images people have the most trouble with. As in what kind of mole is the most likely to be missed. Though perhaps dermatologist already know that answer well enough. I would love to see more of such classifiers for other medical conditions, googling for images tends not to produce a representative sample.

sungam 1y ago
Thanks, I'm really pleased that people have found it useful! Wasn't expecting much from the app just coded it in an evening as it's something I've been thinking about for years

MistaGobo 1y ago

WARNING: Not to be viewed while eating!

sungam 1y ago
Perhaps should add a NSFE tag...

asdev 1y ago

is this legal?

sungam 1y ago
Why wouldn't it be? The images are publicly available and have creative commons license.

FpUser 1y ago

I like the thing but .. "Vibe coded" - asked ChatGPT or whatever alternative to do the thing for me. There is no fucking vibe here, just another cheesy term.

m-hodges 1y ago

Good example of shovelware that some say is absent.¹ ¹ https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...

sungam 1y ago
Had not heard of that term before, but looking at the article I would agree!

meindnoch 1y ago

Is this really "invasive melanoma"? https://drmagnuslynch.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/isic-images/ISIC_0024270.jpg https://drmagnuslynch.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/isic-images...

deleted 1y ago
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jonahx 1y ago
Yeah that seems likely to be a misclassification...
sungam 1y ago
According to the metadata supplied with the dataset yes Could definitely be a misclassification, however a small proportion of moles that look entirely harmless to the naked eye and under the dermatoscope (skin microscope) can be cancerous. For example, have a look at these images of naevoid melanoma: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=naevoid+melanoma https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=naevoid+melanoma This is why dermatology can be challenging and why AI-based image classification is difficult from a liability/risk perspective I was previously clinical lead for a melanoma multidisciplinary meeting and 1-2 times per year I would see a patient with a melanoma that presented like this and looking back at previous photos there was no features that would have worried me. The key thing that I emphasise to patients is that even if a mole looks harmless it is important to monitor for any signs of change since a skin cancer will almost always change in appearance over a period of several months
- jonahx 1y ago
  > however a small proportion of moles that look entirely harmless to the naked eye and under the dermatoscope (skin microscope) can be cancerous. That is very scary. So the only way to be sure is to have everything sent to the lab. But I'm guessing cost/benefit of that from a risk perspective make it prohibitive? So if you're an unlucky person with a completely benign-presenting melanoma, you're just shit out of luck? Or will the appearance change before it spreads internally?

jonahx 1y ago

Cool project, and helpful for learning. One concern: I don't believe the rates that you see "concerning" vs "not-concerning" in the app match the population rates. That is, a random "mole-like spot or thingy" on a random person will have have a much lower base rate of being cancerous than the app would suggest. Of course, this is necessary to make the learning efficient. But unless you pair it with base rate education it will create a bias for over-concern.

sungam 1y ago
Yes you are right - the representation is biased due to the image dataset that I have used. I don't think it would be useful to match the population distribution since the fraction of skin cancers would be tiny (less than 1:1000 of the images) so users would not learn what a skin cancer looks like, however in the next version I will make it closer to 50:50 and highlight the difference from the population distribution.
- jonahx 1y ago
  Yes. As I said matching the population base rate wouldn't be practical, so you'd need to educate on that separately from the identification learning. Let's say I achieve a 95% on the app though. Most people would have a massively over-inflated sense of their correctness in the wild. If the actual fraction is only 1/1000 and I see a friend with a lesion I identify as concerning, then my actual success rate would be: 1*0.95 / (0.05*999 + 1*0.95) So ~1.8%, not 95%. Few people understand Bayesian updating.
  - sungam 1y ago
    Thanks for this - I need to look at this more carefully

owenversteeg 1y ago

(spoilers!) here's how to win: everything is cancer, except the common moles and the keratoses. OP, what are some of the other common options for a spot on the body aside from common moles, cancer, and keratoses? Solar lentigines, freckles, bug bites, eczema? I'm also curious what the actual chance of cancer is given a random mole anywhere on the body, obviously a more involved question.

sungam 1y ago
Good observations! But hopefully you learned something in coming to those conclusion... The chance of a random skin lesion being skin cancer is extremely low. Apart from the appearance key things to look for are a lesion that is not going away particularly if it is changing in appearance. Here are some other common skin lesions: - Dermatofibroma (harmless skin growth) - Actinic keratosis (sun damage) - Milium - Comedome - Acne pustule / nodule - Viral wart - Molluscum contagiousum (harmless viral growth) - Cherry angioma (harmless blood vessel growth) - Spider naevus (another type of blood vessel growth) There are more than 2000 diagnoses in dermatology so not an exhaustive list!

saulpw 1y ago

The hamburger menu "About" and "How To Recognize Skin Cancer" both go to a 404 page that's a copy of a company website called "Revessa Health". Is this your company?

sungam 1y ago
Thanks for highlighting - I wasn't expecting anyone to use the app so haven't added these yet but will do so asap The app is hosted on my Digital Ocean server that hosts a few other projects including my Revessa Health site

haspok 1y ago

A few years ago there used to be an ML-based app for Android that could classify photos of lesions that you took with your phone and could recommend you a visit to the dermatologist (or not). Unfortunately it seems to be removed now, the webpage is still live (somewhat): https://emdee.ai/ https://emdee.ai/ It was done by a small team in Hungary, with the support of MDs of course. (I would guess that the majority of the work was coordinating with MDs, getting them to teach the software... and collecting photos of lesions. Must have been fun!) They probably could not monatize it (or were not interested, or it was just too much work for a side hustle)... the sad reality of living in Eastern Europe. I do think that the idea is perfect, it is non-invasive, but could warn you of a potentially very dangerous condition in time. You don't have to wait for the doctor, or unnecessarily visit them. I would actually pay for this as a service.

lelele 1y ago
There is another one such app: https://www.skinvision.com/ https://www.skinvision.com/
sungam 1y ago
Making an app like this is (relatively) straightforward. The challenge is managing liability / risk / regulation. For individual doctors we accept that some errors will occur and there is a well defined insurance / liability framework. We do not yet have this for AI but I think it will come eventually.
epolanski 1y ago
It's Hungary, a country in the EU, I see no reason why would they not be able to monetize it if they wanted to. Bar a lack of a vibrant VC scene they have the very same monetization option one in SF would have. The most probable reason they did not was to avoid assuming legal responsibility for the results.

mustaphah 1y ago

cool, very nice. The real test starts when the first dependency gets deprecated.

sungam 1y ago
No dependencies - single page app with no backend including all html/css/js

yieldcrv 1y ago

It’s great that more people can express themselves For personal fulfillment, humanities evolutionary fitness, and for commercial purposes

retinaros 1y ago

Ok everything is cancer. Thanks for nothing now I wont sleep

cindyllm 1y ago
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jacquesm 1y ago

Nice job. Now you really need to study up on the statistics behind this and you'll quickly come to the conclusion that this was the easy part. What to do with the output is the hard part. I've seen a start-up that made their bread and butter on such classifications, they did an absolutely great job of it but found the the problem of deciding what to do with such an application without ending up with net negative patient outcomes to be far, far harder than the classification problem itself. The error rates, no matter how low, are going to be your main challenge, both false positives and false negatives can be extremely expensive, both in terms of finance and in terms of emotion.

sungam 1y ago
Thanks for your comment - the purpose of this app is patient education rather than diagnosis but I will definitely have a look at the relevant stats in more detail!
- jacquesm 1y ago
  The risk I think is that people will not understand that that is your goal, instead they will use it to help them diagnose something they might think is suspicious. They will go through your images until they get a good score, believe themselves and expert and proceed to diagnose themselves (and their friends). By the time you have an image set that is representative and that will actually educate people to the point where they know what to do and what not to do you've created a whole raft of amateur dermatologists. And the result of that will be that a lot of people are going to knock on the doors of real dermatologists who might tell them not to worry about something when they are now primed to argue with them. I've seen this pattern before with self diagnosis.
  - nextaccountic 1y ago
    So what? Are you arguing that ensuring patients have less information available about diseases leads to better outcomes? What's your take on public campaigns about self diagnosing mammary cancer by touch? (very common where I live) As a patient I'd rather have more information available to me, even if I ultimately defer to specialists Also it's common for medical professionals to ignore symptoms of certain demographics - in those cases, enabling patients to advocate for themselves is essential https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/well/mind/medical-gaslighting.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/well/mind/medical-gasligh... A personal anecdote of mine was a friend that had abdominal pain for months. She had some comorbidities that made it easier for doctors to dismiss her symptoms. After visits to various doctors she only got adequate treatment because I went with her and advocated for her. After discarding multiple options eventually a renal infection was diagnosed and treated. If she went with the opinion of the first doctor she would still have the underlying condition untreated.

geoffbp 1y ago

“How to recognise skin cancer” link from the menu goes to 404

sungam 1y ago
Sorry - wasn't expecting anyone to use the app or any traction on HN! Will update

kittikitti 1y ago

This is actually a really great vibe coded app. It's simple and doesn't require much logic. Will vibe coding catch on to more sophisticated and complex use cases? That's only if the whispers about an upcoming AI Winter are false.

sungam 1y ago
Thanks - I'm glad you found it useful! I have been meaning to make it for many years but could never justify the time involved until AI made it possible.

incone123 1y ago

The link to "how to recognise..." is broken. Nice app. But wouldn't a doctor normally get a history as well? Anyway, I'm not a doctor which is probably why I got most of the answers wrong :)

sungam 1y ago
Yes a doctor would get a history which will help, however I get a high score on these images and another skin cancer doctor that commented also got a high score so in most cases the diagnosis can be made accurately on the image alone.

krunger 1y ago

No reason why it couldn't have been done in reverse, have a programmer code it while using AI to understand skin cancer.

ajkjk 1y ago
Well.. there is somewhat more on the line if it's wrong that way.
sungam 1y ago
There are lots of apps that do this. It's (relatively) easy to get AI to perform at the same level of a dermatologist but liability/risk management/regulation is much harder to solve

roggenbuck 1y ago

This is great!

johannes_ne 1y ago

I made a quite similar app 7 years ago. https://melanoma.jenevoldsen.com/ https://melanoma.jenevoldsen.com/ May have been in the training data.

sungam 1y ago
That's great! I used the publicly available images from the ISIC challenge dataset which are CC licensed.
- johannes_ne 1y ago
  Sorry, my point was not that you had taken the idea or the images (I also used ISIC). I just considered that the language model (Gemini) may have been especially effective at coding this specific app idea, sine my old app (which is on GitHub) was probably in the data it was trained on.

globalise83 1y ago

As someone with literally every single possible variation of skin blemish, mole and God knows what else, this scares the living hell out of me.

mewpmewp2 1y ago
Yeah, I only have just 1 concerning, but still made me spend 20 minutes googling difference between dermatofibroma and basal cell cancer. I think it is dermatofibroma, but I guess good point anyway to let it get checked out.
abootstrapper 1y ago
Get a yearly full body skin check from a dermatologist. It’s a common thing. I’ve been doing it for years because of my skin type. They caught early Basal cell carcinoma the last time I went.

123sereusername 1y ago

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Kibranoz 1y ago

doing this in real dev could have taken similar time.

sungam 1y ago
For an experienced front end dev yes - for the average dermatologist no chance!

ada1981 1y ago

How good is ChatGPT or Claude at classifying these? Have you tried?

sungam 1y ago
Not tried but my guess is ChatGPT will be quite accurate but get a small proportion wrong. The challenge with skin cancer is that we cannot afford to miss even 1:10,000 cases
- ada1981 1y ago
  Are doctors that accurate?

derbOac 1y ago

Cool but it seems like it would get more difficult with more non-cancerous but medically concerning lesions (eg due to infectious disease).

sungam 1y ago
This is true - there are more than 2000 different conditions in dermatology but the most important ones to recognise are skin cancers
- derbOac 1y ago
  My concern (?) is the task is unrealistically easy without more varieties of lesions to distinguish from cancer.

thimkerbell 1y ago

Why would a dermatologist want to just remove but not biopsy a suspected facial skin cancer?

sungam 1y ago
There would be no reason to do this - skin lesions removed are almost always sent for pathological analysis even if expected to be harmless

JeremyJaydan 1y ago

I absolutely love the reality check on doctors coding and skin cancer, great work!

reilly3000 1y ago

There may be an interesting opportunity to gather data on the accuracy of guesses per image. You could use something like Google analytics, but simple server-side logging is more private and keeps the page light. The question could be: What images are most often mistaken? What characteristics do they share? Knowing the highest false negative images would be really valuable people to know what not to ignore.

Uptrenda 1y ago

Biggest irony of the thread is the OP and the ones commenting celebrating the tech putting themselves out of the job while contributing it. Eg. a dermatologist who looks at skin conditions -- a very visual skill. They use their skills at that to build an app that people can use to check for skin cancer, rashes, whatever. Now, people have less incentive to see a dermatologist and might miss the zebras (and in fact: people are lazy and tend to hate doctors already so they won't.) Then there's the software engineers here who (even if you're a high level senior engineer) are further moved down the chopping board the better AI gets. YAY, three cheers for all the soy boys building AI. See you on unemployment soon.

noisy_boy 1y ago

This just highlights that domain experts became even more valuable with LLMs. Not only they know the domain, now they realise their ideas too with minor effort. Doesn't bode well for programmers in non-tech areas.

sungam 1y ago
This is true, however I am sure that AI-based image analysis will also replace some of the work of dermatologists eventually so nobody is safe...

softwaredoug 1y ago

Vibe coding is like spreadsheets. We take spreadsheet for granted. VisiCalc back in the day unlocked computing for an average person in the same way AI does today. Back then to tabulate some stats you’d need a team of programmers. When spreadsheets became available, anyone could figure out how to essentially program a computer without software background. It would be interesting to see how spreadsheets failed/succeeded to learn the limits of vibe coding. For example it’s a common meme that you find teams using spreadsheets as databases. Perhaps they are so successful that they end up being misused. Would the same happen with AI coding?

sungam 1y ago
I think we are going to see more and more people in diverse fields developing applications that meet the requirements of a small niche that may not have been economically viable previously.

zoeey 1y ago

This project really resonates with me. I have a few friends in healthcare who had great ideas for patient tools, but without a technical partner and no budget for a development team, nothing ever came of them. Seeing someone actually build something like this, even if it's not perfect, gives me a sense of hope. When you combine domain expertise with some AI tools, you don’t have to wait around for someone else. You can just start.

akeck 1y ago

How do you tell the difference between benign Seborrheic Keratosis and melanoma? Some of them are very similar!

smnplk 1y ago

I was vibe coding server configurations all day.

8mobile 1y ago

You've really had a great idea, and maybe you can save lives with this. Do you process the images yourself? Do you pass them to some AI? How does it work for privacy? Do you delete them afterwards? Thanks and congratulations.

elzbardico 1y ago

This looks a lot like the early years of the PC, and I love it. Well, you still need to pay for infrastructure, so it is not exactly the same, but I believe that we will see a lot of creative stuff enabled by the fact that LLMs remove a lot of the barriers to entry before the creative layman and coding. I don't fucking care if we all lose our jobs, as long as we also fuck the VCs by making them obsolete.

fragmede 1y ago

how do I submit pics? https://share.icloud.com/photos/048Y_ALNTMwlP3QqZNwja5HEQ https://share.icloud.com/photos/048Y_ALNTMwlP3QqZNwja5HEQ

rasengan0 1y ago

that was fun: Score: 6 / 7 (86%)

deleted 1y ago

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rkunal 1y ago

Would you like to hire "Cyber security engineer for vibe-coded applications" ?

sungam 1y ago
Not at the present time. I think if the project takes off I will move it to static hosting anyway to reduce the attack surface.

ks2048 1y ago

The "About" link leads to "Oops! The page you were looking for doesn't exist.".

thr0waway001 1y ago

This was always the dream for people with real ideas for an app but lacked the knowhow to build it. Namely: “I have an idea for an app but I don’t know how to do it and I don’t want to spend all my time and resources on the app either. The app is a means to an end, not the end itself.” We are now living in a time where getting to the end is much more possible.

caazzi 1y ago

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edimoldovan 1y ago

Pretty nice work. One of the problems I encountered in my career was to understand the actual need. You have that entirely. AI coming in and giving you the ability to do what you and others need and most devs couldn't do without you explainin the need and requirement in detail, is pretty amazing. Maybe you teach this to some non-dev peers of yours?