RE: full para you are getting closer to the whole truth. Compare the AURA and Clinical practitioners biopsy ratios. Why did MELA Sciences use a non-std statistical method on specificity??? Hmmmm??? Since the AURA is still a beta product, results will not be conclusive until more clinical studies can be done in a clinical setting. All in all, looks very promising.
AURA
Aura demonstrated specificities in these three tasks between 15% and 54% with GDA (in most instances using partial least squares resulted in higher specificities) - which resulted in a biopsy ratio (the number of non-melanoma lesions that undergo biopsy for each confirmed case of melanoma) of between 0.77:1 to 5.56:1.
MD's
Relative to the biopsy ratio, for reference the manuscript cites a retrospective study of ~5,000 pigmented skin lesions evaluated by ~500 general practitioners which resulted in a biopsy ratio between 58:1 and 21:1 (i.e. - 21 non-melanoma lesions biopsied for every confirmed case of melanoma). Other unrelated studies have indicated biopsy ratios in clinical practice may be even significantly higher than these figures. Although it's not necessarily fair (as there could be significant differences in the make-up of the various studies) to make a direct comparison of the biopsy ratios in the Aura study (which appear comparably very strong) with these other studies, at least on the face of it, the Aura data looks potentially persuasive.
MELAFind
As we noted in our most recent update, the Aura data does look to be very compelling relative to clinical trial data from MELA Sciences Melafind device which showed a sensitivity of 98% and specificity of about 10% in the detection of melanoma. Aura's biopsy ratio appears similarly relatively strong. Also noteworthy is that MELA opted to use a statistical method different than either GDA or partial least squares, both of which are considered conservative. As such, it's possible that Aura's specificities may have been relatively even stronger than Melafind's had the statistical methods used for both devices' studies been the same.