DevConf.US 2026

Skin Disease Prediction: Take One Photo to Catch Skin Cancer
2026-09-25 –, Ladd Room (Capacity 170)

Most skin cancer datasets are collected in dermatology clinics, using dermatoscopes, full-body photography, and complete patient histories. Most people don't have any of that. They have a phone and an unusual mole.

I built a single-photo skin lesion screening model using the ISIC SLICE-3D dataset and scoped it down to something an actual person could use: one photo in, one prediction out. No account, no lesion history, no clinical context.

I'll talk through the real trade-offs: why patient-level data splitting matters, why plain accuracy is the wrong metric on a dataset that's mostly benign, etc.

I'll close with a demo, a look at what the model is actually paying attention to, and an honest account of what I built.


What level of experience should the audience have to best understand your session?: Beginner - no experience needed

I'm a senior at Boston University studying Data Science, with a growing interest in how machine learning intersects with healthcare, especially medical image analysis. This project started as a way to go beyond coursework and actually wrestle with the mess of a real dataset: class imbalance, data leakage risk, etc.