Itโ€™s still relatively rare for artificial intelligence to deliver a crushing victory over human physiciansย in a head-to-head test of medical expertise. But a deep neural network approachย managed to beatย 42 dermatology experts in diagnosing a common nail fungus that affects about 35 million Americans each year.

The latest successful demonstration of AIโ€™s capabilities in the medical field relied heavily upon a team of South Koreanย researchers puttingย together a huge dataset of almost 50,000 images of toenails and fingernails.

That large amount of data used to train the deep neural networks on recognizing cases of onychomycosisโ€”a common fungal infection that can make nails discolored and brittleโ€”provided the crucial edge that enabled deep learning to outperform medical experts.