New research out of the Lancet found that publicly available datasets that are used to train skin cancer diagnosis algorithms are lacking data surrounding ethnicity and skin type.
“Although this represents a rich data resource for innovation, lack of transparency in metadata reporting for clinically essential characteristics (such as ethnicity and Fitzpatrick skin type) limits the clinical utility of these images alone. These issues are not limited to dermatology datasets, but have also been reported in ophthalmology and radiology,” authors of the research wrote.