DeepMind to develop product to spot eye disease
: DeepMind, the London-based artificial intelligence company that is owned by Alphabet Inc., plans to develop a medical product that will help doctors to detect more than 50 sight-threatening conditions from a common type of eye scan.DeepMind trained artificial intelligence software to detect signs of disease better than human doctors, according to a study published Monday 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, said they plan prospective clinical trials of the technology 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. The software would be the first time a DeepMind AI algorithm using machine learning has ended up in a healthcare product.Alphabet has several initiatives aimed at using artificial intelligence to improve healthcare. Earlier this year, Verily, an Alphabet-owned life sciences company, teamed up with AI experts from Google to develop an algorithm that could spot a range of cardiovascular issues from a different kind of retinal image. DeepMind itself has an entire division devoted to healthcare, and has research projects with the UK’s National Health Service and with the US department of veterans affairs, among others.
LONDON