A Scottish researcher at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University has led the development of a new AI tool that could transform skin cancer care for patients living in remote areas by allowing for fast and potentially life-saving diagnoses.

Spearheading the project, Tess Watt, a PhD candidate at Heriot-Watt, has worked for two years to create the AI-powered health application intended for use in areas where early detection of skin conditions is limited due to minimal access to dermatologists.  

Closing that accessibility gap, the new system uses low-cost Raspberry Pi devices and can diagnose a skin condition without the need for internet access.   

Patients first take a picture of their skin issue using a small camera attached to the Raspberry Pi, which is then analysed in real-time using image classification, comparing it to a dataset of thousands of images to reach a diagnosis.

The findings are then shared with a local GP service to begin a suitable treatment plan.

“Healthcare from home is a really important topic at the moment, especially as GP wait times continue to grow,” said Watt. “If we can empower people to monitor skin conditions from their own homes using AI, we can dramatically reduce delays in diagnosis.”

Although already claiming up to 85% accuracy in its diagnostic capabilities, the team intends to increase the success rate by gaining access to more skin lesion datasets, which can be fed to the machine learning model. 

A prototype of the new system has already been demonstrated at Heriot-Watt’s advanced health and care technologies suite, which showed how AI can analyse images of skin lesions and flag potential risks for further medical review.

While the technology has yet to be tested in real-world clinical settings, Watt is already in talks with NHS Scotland to begin the ethical approval process, though deployment likely remains a few years away.

Recommended reading

• New Aberdeen Tech Can See ‘Undetectable’ Cancer Spread
• Scottish Uni Granted £750k for Early Cancer Detection
• New NHS Tech Rollout Aims to Expedite Cancer Diagnosis

Working alongside academics from Edinburgh Napier, London’s South Bank University, and the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas, based in Greece, Watt’s long-term vision is to roll the system out across remote regions of Scotland first before expanding to global areas with limited access to health care.

Commenting on the project, Watt’s academic supervisor, Dr Christos Chrysoulas, said: “E-health devices must be engineered to operate independently of external connectivity to ensure continuity of patient service and safety.

“Ensuring this level of resilience in affordable, low-cost medical devices is the essence of our research, particularly for deployment in resource-limited settings and areas with limited or no connectivity, where uninterrupted patient care must still be guaranteed.”