Itโs 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 AIโs 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 onychomycosisโa common fungal infection that can make nails discolored and brittleโprovided the crucial edge that enabled deep learning to outperform medical experts.