This is fantastic and I would do something similar if I had the same resources.

Whole genome sequencing and single cell sequencing are actually surprisingly inexpensive (compared to the cost of almost any cancer treatment) and there is a good argument that we should do this by default for any type of cancer for which there are not effective treatments.

I would encourage all patients to learn as much as possible about their own diagnosis. There may be clinical trials available in another centre that your clinician is not aware of or tumour-agnostic trials that target specific mutations that are present in a range of different cancers.

There is a good argument for allowing patients to try experimental treatments once standard treatments are exhausted. The provider liability issues could easily be solved by legislation. A bigger issue is that there will always be people who want to exploit vulnerable cancer patients by charging exorbitant amounts for plausible-sounding treatments which have no evidence base.

As an individual trying multiple experimental treatments at once is the logical approach if there is no other option. However it will not be possible to know which of these is effective and which have caused side effects so to develop more effective treatments we do need structured and carefully controlled clinical trials. Unfortunately there is a huge regulatory burden for any kind of clinical trial at present and this should be massively streamlined for cancer patients where even if the treatments cause harm the alternative is death.

Performing the procedure requires a high level of skill in interpreting scans (angiograms) in real time.

In fairness, while I’m sure it didn’t work out for all of them, one of these students became one of the youngest self made billionaires in history

He did it to the smartest kid in our CS class. I feel bad now because I feel like he deserves a degree.

A classmate of mine dropped out to do this. Failed, and ended up picking up later to finish the last two years of college. It really didn’t seem to have slowed them down, and finishing college a few years later (with some startup founders experience) seems to have been overall good. Unfortunately did end up going to Boston Consulting Group from on-campus recruiting, so not a great end to the story, but historically that’s a high-ish paying and hard to get job.

I get the feeling only very affluent and well-supported people follow this path, and they probably don't need THiel's money to do it. The vast majority don't have a few years at this stage of their life to play the lottery.

Yeah, I hung out with one of the early batches of these people (my former supervisor was involved) and would agree that they tended to be from better off families. How much of that was the Ivy league selection bias vs anything else I dunno though.

He'll receive plenty of opportunities regardless of degree so I don't see why you feel sorry for him.

He would have made a fantastic professor in my opinion. But I think also, certain opportunities just require a degree on a policy level.

Doesn't mean that this was a good thing for them. For example, many kid actors who become rich and famous are not happy.

I mean... is it self-made if a billionaire helped you?

This is true, however I am sure that AI-based image analysis will also replace some of the work of dermatologists eventually so nobody is safe...

Not at the present time. I think if the project takes off I will move it to static hosting anyway to reduce the attack surface.

I think we are going to see more and more people in diverse fields developing applications that meet the requirements of a small niche that may not have been economically viable previously.

Not tried but my guess is ChatGPT will be quite accurate but get a small proportion wrong. The challenge with skin cancer is that we cannot afford to miss even 1:10,000 cases

Are doctors that accurate?

For an experienced front end dev yes - for the average dermatologist no chance!

This is true - there are more than 2000 different conditions in dermatology but the most important ones to recognise are skin cancers

My concern (?) is the task is unrealistically easy without more varieties of lesions to distinguish from cancer.

There would be no reason to do this - skin lesions removed are almost always sent for pathological analysis even if expected to be harmless