People of Georgian: Alumnus uses artificial intelligence to detect skin cancer

What’s your story?

The Georgian community is full of unique, inspiring perspectives —and we’re sharing them as part of an ongoing series.

People of Georgian: Meet Arjun Pawar

I was helping build an app that detects and classifies skin cancer and skin conditions.

The idea is people can use the app by scanning the area of concern on their skin and they’ll know what the condition is within a minute. Then, they can show the results to a doctor they are connected to within the app.

A person with short, black hair, glasses and a goatee stands outside on a sidewalk and smiles, with an orange sunset sky above.

I did this work during a project for my Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Architecture, Design and Implementation program where I got to work for the company Skinopathy.

The team there and I worked on this project for four months during the winter semester to try and develop a model that would really help the doctors be more accurate and efficient when they’re treating patients.

Our main goal is to help patients who really don’t know what’s happening with their skin and may get tense about it after searching on their own on Google.

From pain comes inspiration

I actually chose to join this project because I was suffering from a painful skin allergy when I first arrived in Canada.

I wasn’t able to see a doctor for, like, two or three weeks because I was new to Canada and didn’t know how to book an appointment or get a family doctor.

When I was suffering, I couldn’t find any solution and I ended up contacting doctors in my home country and had to keep sending them photos of my infected regions.

I realized if I would have this app with me, it would be really helpful for my doctor back in India to have this virtual assistance and get advice and recommendations more easily.

So, when I heard about this project with Skinopathy, I thought, “This is going to help a lot of people.”

A person sitting on a train looks out the window.

‘There’s a digital revolution’

Artificial intelligence is there to make our lives easy; that’s the main purpose of it. For example, Siri and Alexa are artificial intelligence.

What makes me excited is there’s a lot of data floating around and you can make use of that to create something.

Even the Skinopathy project – we could tweak some things in our algorithm and use it for traffic control.

There are so many things you can do in this field. I would tell others to join this field because nowadays there’s a digital revolution.

Everyone should know what’s happening around AI and how it’s helping our day-to-day life.

Arjun Pawar, an alumnus of Georgian’s Artificial Intelligence – Architecture, Design and Implementation program (class of 2023) and Big Data Analytics program (class of 2022).

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