Show HN: I'm a dermatologist and I vibe coded a skin cancer learning app

What you created is a version of “am I hot or not” for skin cancer. The idea is constrained to the limitations of your programming capability. Showing a photo and creating 3 buttons with a static response is not very helpful. These are the limits of vibe coding.

I was thinking to train a convnet to accurately classify pictures of moles as normal vs abnormal. The user can take a photo and upload it to a diagnostic website and get a diagnosis.

It doesn’t seem like an overly complex model to develop and there is plenty of data referring to photos that show normal vs abnormal moles.

I wonder why a product hasn’t been developed, where we are using image detection on our phones to actively screen for skin cancer. Seems like a no brainer.

My thinking is there are not enough deaths to motivate the work. Dying from melanoma is nasty.

We need liability reform - any app in the US would either tell you ~everything is skin cancer, or it would show one false negative and get sued into oblivion.

I disagree, I found this very helpful. In a very short amount of time I was granted the insight, in a very clear way, that I am not very good at determining whether moles need treatment based on how they look.

Developing a model like that, and evaluating it with practicing doctors, is a good learning project.

You're talking down to a technically unskilled dermatologist for successfully producing a useful app without the help of an engineer? Curious behaviour! This is far from the first story like this, in combination they're a potent bellwether for the future of our little corner of the universe, engaging in denials really doesn't help anyone

I really don't think you can publish the app you described in any developed country without an army of lawyers. And this army had better be prepared to lose many battles.

The goal of my app is to educate patients so that they recognise that they need to take further action.

Regarding AI-assisted skin cancer diagnosis: This is a huge area that started with the publication of Esteva et al (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21056) and there have been hundreds of publications since. There are large publicly available datasets that anyone can work with (https://challenge.isic-archive.com/).

My lab has previously trained / evaluated convnets for diagnosis of skin cancer e.g. see this publication: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32931808/

I have no doubt that it will be possible to train an AI model to perform at the same level as a dermatologist and AI models will become increasingly relevant. The main challenge at the moment is navigating uncertainty / liability since a very small proportion of moles / skin lesions that appear entirely harmless both the naked eye and with the dermatoscope (skin microscope) are cancerous.

Could it be built from an island off Costa Rica?

I wouldn’t call it “successful” or “useful”. It was a low effort attempt to make something interesting and it wasn’t. It’s a response to the hype of vibe coding. Lowers the bar for what good software really is.

Perhaps you may want to question your bias and ability to process criticism.

Anyone who shares their ideas publicly will receive criticism. Not only is it ok, it’s helpful to expand the discussion beyond your bias.

Every dermatologist (and developer with a dermatologist relative) in the world has had that app idea since most of your daily checkups are moles that you categorize in seconds.

The app already exists btw. Did nobody in this thread google it before saying it couldn't work?

What an utterly disappointing comment. FWIW I spent 15min on the app, and found it very helpful to see examples of the various kinds of skin lesion - it will likely motivate me to see a doctor when I see a similar malignant skin lesion. Educating people is very helpful.

Thanks for including those information resources. This is something I’m interested in digging deeper into.

“am I hot or not” is a great paradigm for many things, is it porn or not etc. 3 buttons are perfectly sufficient for getting this information from the users for rating systems in general. This is not a rating system as samples are labeled from actual test results.

AFAIK Netflix got rid of their 5 star rating as the signal over 2 stars wasn’t worth the mental overhead from users having to decide between a 4 and a 5. Also star rating are culturally dependent so you have to normalize for that effect. In general it’s a total hassle.

> It was a low effort attempt to make something interesting and it wasn’t.

Maybe to you, but others in this thread found it interesting.

> Lowers the bar for what good software really is.

Software is a means to some end, not the end in itself. I can make the best coded software that does nothing [0], there is no point to that other than to practice one's skills, but again, those skills are to achieve something in the end.

[0] https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

This vibe coded app totally is helpful.

Improved my score from an abysmal 40% in under 15 units to above 95% accuracy. Also realize that I have skin lesion that warrant an immediate dermatologist visit.

Your characterizations are unnecessarily salty.

I found this app to be very helpful and educational. You, on the other hand, are being a jerk.

The issue is that your criticism is misguided and not very helpful. In your parent comment you totally miss the forest for the trees. Or, the reason why this app has been made in the first place.

Further, your suggestions are inactionable, and again, miss the point. It’s a low effort - “Lol, why don’t you just…”. No, the point is not to find skin cancer. The point is to show a bunch of pictures to people who are interested, and let them see if they can identify worrying skin lesions.