Google’s New Dermatology App Wasn’t Designed for People With Darker Skin
Google on Tuesday unveiled a dermatology app that it says can recognize 288 different skin conditions from pictures, and there’s something very Google about it. The deep learning system the app is based on was originally trained and tested on a dataset that—like the company itself—vastly underrepresents people with dark skin tones.
The app, according to the company’s announcement, grew out of a May 2020 study Google researchers published in the journal Nature Medicine in which they demonstrated the efficacy of using deep learning to recognize skin conditions.
To accomplish the task, the researchers used a training dataset of 64,837 images of 12,399 patients located in two states. But of the thousands of skin conditions pictured, only 3.5 percent came from patients with Fitzpatrick skin types V and VI—those representing brown skin and dark brown or black skin, respectively. 90 percent of the database was composed of people with fair skin, darker white skin, or light brown skin, according to the study.
As a result of the biased sampling, dermatologists say the app could end up over- or under-diagnosing people who aren’t white.
