On Tuesday, at Google’s annual developer conference I/O, the company announced the launch of a new search tool for skin, nail, and hair conditions to serve the two billion people around the world who suffer from them. The technology, validated in a paper published in Nature last year , is nearly as good as a dermatologist at identifying 26 skin conditions, and more accurate than the primary care physicians and nurses in the study. The new search tool, which will launch later this year, serves as another example of how the company thinks that it can support doctors and patients through everyday products. The dermatological assistant lives inside of Google Search and requires a 3G minimum connection. To use it, a person must provide consent and then upload three well-lit photos. The program will ask them a series of questions about their condition. You can bypass this section, but Google product manager and physician Dr. Lily Peng says answering these questions will make the results more accurate. Afterwards, the tool will serve up a list of possible matches with the top three being the most likely culprits. If the AI is less confident in its suggestions, it will note that it is still learning about certain conditions. In addition to skin conditions, the tool will show articles and other related content. [Image: courtesy of Google] Users can then either save their results, delete them, or donate them to Google’s internal research efforts. For those that choose to save or donate, the data is encrypted both in storage and transit, and the company says it will not use the data to target ads. [Image: courtesy of Google] During the three years of research and development that went into the tool, Google trained its dermatological assistant on millions of de-identified skin images. To ensure its technology worked across skin type and tone, Google partnered with 17 clinics to bring in 65,000 de-identified photos of patients’ skin. It can now identify 288 skin, hair, and nail conditions of the over 3,000 conditions that fall within the purview of a dermatologist, according to the American Academy of Dermatology Association . Google says its dermatological assistant is not a diagnostic tool, though both the U.S
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Google’s new AI dermatologist can help you figure out what that mole is