Sydney hospital testing phone gadget to help detect skin cancer risk

Experts are testing a smartphone gadget that is capable of identifying a person's risk of developing skin cancer in their eyes.

The camera clips onto a smartphone and then sends a photo of the person's eye to a specialised app that measures the amount of UV damage the eye has sustained.

Medical experts are now testing if the prototype is as effective as its desktop counterpart, which was also invented by the same team at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney.

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A trial of the product will start soon with 100 participants.

Professor Minas Coroneo from the Prince of Wales Hospital said his team developed the tool as a biomarker for sun exposure after a separate ophthalmologist documented a link to non-cancerous growths on the eye's surface, called a pterygium, and a cancer diagnosis years later.

"He had lots of people with pterygium and he noticed they got the Pterygium in their late teens and then skin cancer ten years later," Coroneo said.

"We've developed this as a biomarker for sun exposure."

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Australia has the highest levels of melanoma in the world, with around 16,800 people diagnosed with skin cancer every year.

Melanoma can be cured by surgery 90 per cent of the time if it's caught early, according to the Melanoma Institute Australia.