Yes, melanoma can be overdiagnosed, but news stories like these don’t discuss it

Source: Health News Review, June 2018

A study generated worldwide news coverage last week for documenting an advance in artificial intelligence (AI) applied to health care. It showed that a “deep learning convolutional neural network” could be trained to differentiate cancerous melanomas from benign moles more accurately than an international group of dermatologists.

Many stories, like this U.S. News & World Reportpiece, suggested that AI “may serve physicians involved in skin cancer screening as an aid in their decision whether to biopsy a lesion or not.”

But none of the stories I looked at paused to ask, Is finding more melanoma definitely a good thing?