Scanning your eyes could reveal heart disease, Google says

I can look into your eyes and see straight to your heart. It may sound like a sappy sentiment from a Hallmark card. Essentially though, that’s what researchers at Google did in applying artificial intelligence to predict something deadly serious: the likelihood that a patient will suffer a heart attack or stroke. The researchers made these determinations by examining images of the patient’s retina.

Google, which is presenting its findings Monday in Nature Biomedical Engineering, an online medical journal, says that such a method is as accurate as predicting cardiovascular disease through more invasive measures that involve sticking a needle in a patient’s arm. At the same time, Google cautions that more research needs to be done.

According to the company, researchers have previously shown some correlation between retinal vessels and the risk of a major cardiovascular episode. Using the retinal image, Google says it was able to quantify this association and 70% of the time accurately predict which patient within five years would experience a heart attack or other major cardiovascular event, and which patient would not. Those results were in line with testing methods that require blood be drawn to measure a patient’s cholesterol.

Google used models based on data from 284,335 patients and validated on two independent data sets of 12,026 and 999 patients.

“The caveat to this is that it’s early, (and) we trained this on a small data set,” says Google’s Lily Peng, a doctor and lead researcher on the project. “We think that the accuracy of this prediction will go up a little bit more as we kind of get more comprehensive data. Discovering that we could do this is a good first step. But we need to validate.”

The image on the right shows how the algorithm picks out vessels to predict blood pressure. GOOGLE