Avery Smith
Melalogic, a Baltimore startup building an app for Black skin health, won a grant from a fund created by software community Mozilla to support Black artists examining AI.
The app that seeks to create a database of Black skin issues to combat racial bias in AI and medicine. It’s the solution Avery Smith designed with a Black dermatologist and a Black medical illustrator to the problem he warned of in a 2018 article published in the medical journal Jama Dermatology: Racial bias in machine learning tools that are being used to decide between malignant and benign moles when testing for melanoma. Dermatologists can use the database to become better educated on Black skin.
Users of the app will submit pictures of their skin and skin issues. The app will provide feedback about what the issue might be, and suggestions on how to should treat it. The idea is that the app is also slowly building a database of Black skin for use by clinicians and researchers.
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