The problem
Dogs with skin cancer are living shorter lives because of unaffordable diagnostic testing.
Currently, diagnostic testing for skin cancer is unaffordable, which is reducing the prognoses, or life expectancies after diagnosis, for dogs with skin cancer by up to 5 years. Right now, the only options for diagnosing skin cancer are to do an FNA (fine needle aspiration) test, often costing between $100 and $200 (USD or CAD), or a biopsy, commonly costing upwards of $400. Because of the cost, diagnostic tests are often skipped early on in the disease, leading to later diagnoses and worse prognoses for dogs with skin cancer.
Learn more about high veterinary costs
Our solution
Using an app-based AI system to detect canine skin cancer earlier
Lynx provides a more affordable alternative for skin cancer screening by utilizing the power of image recognition and neural networks. The system works for veterinarians through two apps: a mobile app with a screening camera that takes an image of the lesion being diagnosed and a desktop app where other information about the patient's health and nonvisual traits of the lesion is entered. Visual data from the Screening Camera and nonvisual data from the veterinarian's inputs on the desktop app is fed to an AI model that outputs a predicted diagnosis for the lesion on the desktop app.
How we know it will work
Validation for our technology
We know that our solution will work because we've spoken with AI experts who have validated the feasibility of our solution and have looked at case studies of similar projects in human medicine. One similar successful project done at MIT used deep learning to help detect melanoma by wide-field images of patients' skin, and they were able to achieve a sensitivity rate in detecting suspicious pigmented lesions of 90.3%.