Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOS
24.1.2019
DERM.AI, AICOS’ Decentralized Health Technologies fully integrated with Portuguese National Health Service
DERM.AI – Usage of Artificial Intelligence to Power Teledermatological Screening, Fraunhofer AICOS’ most recent project, pioneers in being fully integrated with the Primary Care Units and Hospital Dermatology Departments of the National Health Service while using AI to improve the Teledermatological processes and Machine Learning to help the decision making process.
Starting this month and running for three years, this project is coordinated by AICOS and developed in partnership with SPMS – Serviços Partilhados do Ministério da Saúde, under the programme Data Science and Artificial Intelligence in Public Administration.
Skin cancer accounts annually to about one-third of all cancers detected in Portugal, affecting one in seven people throughout their lifetime. The Portuguese Association of Cutaneous Cancer estimates that there may have been about 12,000 new cases of skin cancer in 2017, of which 1,000 will be melanoma.
The Portuguese Government has acknowledge the growing importance of using new technologies to modernize the Public Administration sector, in particular Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, and how this can positively impact the quality of life of citizens. The Programme Data Science and Artificial Intelligence in Public Administration financed by national funds through the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), stands as an example of the government strategy to achieve this goal.
DERM.AI, is the result of the growing interest in Telemedicine and other ICT solutions to improve efficiency and ease the burden on public health services, and fits perfectly in this framework. This project aims to improve the existing Teledermatology processes between Primary Care Units and Hospital Dermatology Departments in the National Health System for skin lesions diagnosis through the usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The planned outcome will change processes by assisting both: general practitioners through a computer vision-based mobile application integrated with the eReferral system named SIGA-VAI; and dermatologists through an AI-powered Risk Prioritization and Decision Support platform, to be included in the eReferral system. By doing so, DERM.AI aims to achieve results that exceed the current state-of-the-art in skin cancer screening by merging dermatological imaging analysis (e.g. extraction of significant features based on the ABCD rule) with textual data (clinical structured information) received through the eReferral process.
Besides contributing to the societal challenges of healthcare processes optimization, early diagnosis and survival rates improvements, this project foresees a fundamental contribution to the area of AI and m-Health technologies’ integration and impact assessment in real operational environment.
Project ‘DERM.AI – Usage of Artificial Intelligence to Power Teledermatological Screening’, is supported by national funds through ‘FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology’ in the scope of ‘Projetos de Investigação Científica e Desenvolvimento Tecnológico em Ciência dos Dados e Inteligência Artificial na Administração Pública 2018’.
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