Fighting Disease with iPhones and Big Data

By Matthew Dublin

A startup iPhone app developer based in Bucharest, Romania, called Skin Scan has big plans to fight and track skin cancer. Skin Scan's app (also called Skin Scan) allows users to snap pictures of questionable moles or lesions which are then sent to Skin Scan's servers where a proprietary algorithm analyzes the picture. While the app will not provide an accurate diagnosis — yet — the algorithm will identify abnormalities and assign a rating for the abnormality from low-risk to high-risk and then refers users to local dermatologists.

Skin Scan is building an analytic database based on photographs and results from user, including location data in order to create a time-space map model based on the severity and frequency of lesions.

As skin cancer is best analyzed over time, this data may be useful to not only physicians, but government and academic researchers tracking cancer as well, assuming it can be sufficiently de-identified.

The app developer also has designs on connecting doctors and users to eliminate in-person office visits.

In discussions of personalized medicine, the concept that someday soon patients might walk around with their genomes in their pockets or on mobile devices is often batted around but the viability or execution is rarely explored. Technology developments such as Skin Scan could prove to be a good test case for connecting patients with physicians with personalized medical data in a way that integrates instantaneous communication and real-time data analysis with consumer electronic devices.