AI algorithm beats human doctors at detecting eye disease

Technology for scanning eyes is so advanced it has outstripped the ability of doctors to interpret the images it produces – meaning more patients than necessary are being referred to eye specialists, potentially delaying treatment for those at risk of going blind.

Artificial intelligence may come to the rescue. Deepmind, the AI company owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, trained artificial intelligence software to detect signs of disease better than human doctors, according to a study published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine.

DeepMind and its partners in the research, London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital and the University College London Institute of Ophthalmology, plan to develop a medical product that will help doctors detect more than 50 sightthreatening conditions from a common type of eye scan.

Clinical trials of the technology are scheduled to begin in 2019. If those trials are successful, DeepMind said it would seek to create a regulator-approved product that Moorfields could roll out across the UK. It said the product would be free for an initial five-year period.

That would mark the first use in a health care product of a DeepMind AI algorithm. The DeepMind-Moorfields research looked at a type of eye scan called optical coherence tomography (OCT) that can be used to diagnose age-related macular degeneration (AMD), now the leading cause of blindness in the developed world, as well as other retinal disorders linked to conditions such as diabetes. Bloomberg