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Artificially intelligent computer systems are used extensively in medical sciences. Common applications include diagnosing patients, end-to-end drug discovery and development, improving communication between physician and patient, transcribing medical documents, such as prescriptions, and remotely treating patients. While computer systems often execute tasks more efficiently than humans, more recently, state-of-the-art computer algorithms have achieved accuracies which are at par with human experts in the field of medical sciences. Some speculate that it is only a matter of time before humans are completely replaced in certain roles within the medical sciences. The motivation of this article is to discuss the ways in which artificial intelligence is changing the landscape of medical science and to separate hype from reality.

Advances in Machine Learning and availability of state-of-the-art computational resources, along with digitized healthcare data, have set the stage for extensive application of artificial intelligence in the realm of diagnosis, prognosis, clinical decision support, personalized treatment options, drug development, and the field of biomedicine. Here, we discuss the application of Machine Learning algorithms in patient healthcare and dermatological domains along with the ethical complexities that are involved. In scientific studies, ethical challenges were initially not addressed proportionally (as assessed by keyword counts in PubMed) and just more recently (since 2016) this has started to improve. Few pioneering countries have created regulatory guidelines around how to respect matters of (1) privacy, (2) fairness, (3) accountability, (4) transparency and (5) conflict of interest when developing novel medical Machine Learning applications. While there is a strong promise of emerging medical applications to ultimately benefit both the patients and the medical practitioners, it is important to raise awareness on the five key ethical issues and incorporate them into medical practice in the near future.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a major frontier in computer science research. Although AI has been available for some time and found its application in many fields of medicine, its use in dermatology is comparatively new and limited. A sound understanding of the concepts of AI is essential for dermatologists as skin conditions with their abundant clinical and dermatoscopic data and images can potentially be the next big thing in the application of AI in medicine. There are already a number of artificial intelligence studies focusing on skin disorders, such as skin cancer, psoriasis, atopic dermatitis and onychomycosis. This article presents an overview of AI and new developments relevant to dermatology, examining both its current applications and future potential.

Lasers have come up as the newest therapeutic modality in dermatological conditions including melasma. In this article, as a group of experts from Pigmentary Disorders Society in collaboration with South Asian Pigmentary Disorders Forum (SPF), we have tried to discuss the lasers which have been used in melasma and formulate simple consensus guidelines. Following thorough literature search, we have summarised the rationale of using the lasers and the supporting evidences have also been provided. It is clear that laser cannot be the first line treatment for melasma. However, it can be used as an adjuvant therapy in resistant cases, provided the selection of patient and counselling has been done properly.