Google DeepMind has announced its second collaboration with the NHS, as part of which it will work with Moorfields Eye Hospital in east London to build a machine learning system which will eventually be able to recognise sight-threatening conditions from just a digital scan of the eye. The five-year research project will draw on one million anonymous eye scans which are held on Moorfields' patient database, reports Ars Technica, with the aim to speed up the complex and time-consuming process of analysing eye scans. From the report:The hope is that this will allow diagnoses of common causes of sight loss, like diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration, to be spotted more rapidly and hence be treated more effectively. For example, Google says that up to 98 percent of sight loss resulting from diabetes can be prevented by early detection and treatment. Two million people are already living with sight loss in the UK, of whom around 360,000 are registered as blind or partially-sighted.

Google DeepMind and the NHS are developing a machine learning system with Moorfields Eye Hospital that can recognize sight-threatening conditions from just a digital scan of the eye. Mustafa Suleyman, Deepmind's co-founder, says this is the company's first foray into a purely medical research. In this new collaboration with Moorfields, an algorithm will be trained using one million anonymized eye scans to train to identify early signs of degenerative eye conditions such as wet age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. "If you have diabetes you're 25 times more likely to go blind. If we can detect this, and get in there as early as possible, then 98% of the most severe visual loss might be prevented," says Suleyman.

The NHS is to use artificial intelligence in the fight against sight loss with a retina-scanning system that detects the early signs of eye disease. One million patient retina scans are to be fed into an AI computer to teach it how to detect age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy and other conditions. The system is being developed by Moorfields Eye Hospital, in London, and DeepMind, the British AI company owned by Google. DeepMind was criticised by privacy groups in April after it emerged that a London hospital had granted the company access to as many as 1.6 million patient records…

An eye hospital in London is entering the debate over patient privacy by sharing images of patients' retinas with a Google-owned artificial intelligence project. Moorfields Eye Hospital is anonymizing and then sharing patient information with DeepMind, a machine-learning AI company that plans to use the hospital's non-invasive retina scans to train its machines, which must scan thousands and thousands of images to "learn" how an eye should look. While patients consented to general research, privacy advocates have expressed concerns they may not have realized the extent to which their personal information – even scans of their eyes – would be handed over to an outside party such as Google. The hospital has taken an important first step by informing patients before the project begins, which is likely a lesson learned from a previous medical research project in Britain. In a previous data-sharing partnership between DeepMind and three other London hospitals, patients discovered the involvement of their data only haphazardly afterward, the BBC reported.

Across the world there is an estimated 285 million visually impaired people, and 39 million of these are blind. Conditions like age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy can be picked up is using digital screenings, which are highly complex and take a lot of time to analyse. Now Google's DeepMind Health is teaming up with a London eye hospital to investigate how machine learning could help analyse these scans efficiently and effectively. Moorfields Eue Hospital in London has announced a new medical research partnership with Google's DeepMind Health that could revolutionise the way professionals carry out eye tests and lead to earlier detection of common eye diseases Diabetes is on the rise. It's estimated that 1 in 11 of the world's adult population are affected.

DeepMind, Google's London-based artificial intelligence company, has started training neural networks to recognise the signs of eye disease in medical images. A partnership with Moorfields Eye Hospital in London has given the company access to about a million anonymised retinal scans, which DeepMind will feed into its artificial intelligence software. The project will target two of the most common eye diseases – age related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. More than 100 million people around the world have these conditions. The information that Moorfields is providing includes scans of the back of people's eyes, as well as more detailed scans known as optical coherence tomography (OCT). The idea is that the images will let DeepMind's neural networks learn to recognise subtle signs of degenerating eye conditions that even trained clinicians have trouble spotting.

Google's DeepMind is teaming up with NHS-funded Moorfields Eye Hospital to research whether machine learning can help the fight against blindness. The NHS said AI could play a "big role in tackling avoidable sight loss" and the partnership is intended to explore "how cutting edge technologies can help medical research into eye diseases". This includes macular degeneration, which generally affects the elderly, as well as diabetes-related sight loss. Machine learning processes will be applied to around a million eye scans to help search for early symptoms of sight loss. The number of people with sight loss is set to double by 2050, with around two million people in the UK currently living with sight loss – around one in 30.

The NHS is pairing up with Google's artificially intelligent image software DeepMind for a new medical research partnership that could play a "big role in tackling avoidable sight loss." Specialists at the NHS-funded Moorfields Eye Hospital in London will use DeepMind, the internet giant's machine learning project, to research whether the technology can help detect and prevent eye diseases and blindness. DeepMind will be applied to one million anonymous eye scans to look for early signs of eye conditions that humans might miss such as macular degeneration and retinal conditions caused by diabetes. The end goal of the research is to create a more efficient method by which to analyse data and come to an earlier diagnosis for patients. The number of people suffering from sight loss in the UK is predicted to double by 2050, and the project marks Google's first machine learning collaboration with healthcare specialists.

Google-owned DeepMind has expanded its collaboration with the UK's National Health Service (NHS), announcing a research partnership today with Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in London -- its second publicly confirmed foray into working with the NHS. But this time the project is being explicitly badged as medical research, and DeepMind will be applying AI machine learning algorithms to the data -- so that's also a first. Although the company has been public about its ambitions to apply AI to health data before now. The Moorfields partnership is focused on two specific sight-loss causing conditions: diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which DeepMind notes collectively affect more than 625,000 people in the UK and more than 100 million people worldwide. The stated aim is to investigate whether machine learning algorithms can automate the analysis of the digital eye scans that are typically used to diagnose the two conditions.

NHS eye hospital Moorfields has announced it is working with DeepMind -- an artificial intelligence research lab acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported 400 million -- in a bid to identify people who are likely to lose their sight as a result of an eye disease. Through the medical research partnership, Moorfields will investigate whether DeepMind's AI technology can be used to help spot early signs of eye conditions that human eye care experts might miss. In order to determine whether DeepMind's AI technology is useful for diagnosing eye conditions, Moorfields is applying the company's algorithms to one million anonymous OCT (Optical Coherence Tomography) scans. The aim is to determine whether the algorithms can learn to spot early signs of age-related macular degeneration and sight loss that occurs as a result of diabetes. Mustafa Suleyman, Google DeepMind cofounder and head of DeepMind Health, told Business Insider that he wants DeepMind's AI to understand the structure and nature of eye scans "well enough to be able to try to predict in advance which ones indicate that a patient may be at risk to a particular kind of eye disease." The algorithms that DeepMind builds are known as machine learning algorithms because they have the ability to learn through training without being explicitly programmed.